


somewhere surely lived

by sunbrights



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dating, Eventual Relationships, F/F, F/M, M/M, POV Alternating, Rebellion, Relationship Issues, sometimes smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-03-17 13:51:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 62,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13660329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbrights/pseuds/sunbrights
Summary: Hope's Peak is not just a dating program; it's a guarantee. With the right compatible partner, the benefits are endless: boosted life expectancy, improved self-esteem, increased productivity, new opportunities, better overall work and life satisfaction. For society's elite, Hope's Peak makes finding that partner straightforward, if not easy.It provides an Ultimate Match-- provided the participants are willing to go through its paces.(AU based on the Black Mirror episode, "Hang the DJ.")





	1. Mahiru Koizumi

**Author's Note:**

> A special project I slapped together for Valentine's Day/White Day! None of my other projects will be on hold while this is being posted; I just wanted to do something extra and it got a bit out of hand, like always. I hope you enjoy!

2  
WEEKS

“What?” she says. “That can’t be right. That’s barely any time at all.”

He taps the round, black face of his device again, but the number doesn’t change. Two weeks.

The server brings by pre-selected menu choices: poached salmon for him and parmesan risotto for her. He knew going in that the system was designed to automate as much as possible. (“Optimizing everyday decisions allows participants to focus their energy on developing their relationships,” his device had told him, after he booted it up the first time.) That doesn’t stop it from being fucking weird, having a plate slid in front of him without preamble.

He can’t find room to be pissed about it, though. The fish is cooked perfectly, exactly to his tastes. He can’t say he wouldn’t have picked it himself, if he’d been given the option; it just might’ve taken him longer to get there.

The girl is still focused on her device. She has it cupped in one hand, and is swiping through the different menu options. She’s pretty, he guesses; she has a narrow face and dark eyes, but also a short bob haircut that keeps her from looking too severe. He’s never really thought much about red hair on women... but apparently the system didn’t think much of it, either, if this is all the time it gave them.

“Usami,” she says, and it lights up to acknowledge her, “is it really only two weeks?”

“That’s right!”

“What the fuck are we supposed to do with that?” he snaps around his mouthful. The girl gives him a sour look.

“I’m sorry,” his device chirps from his elbow, “that question is too broad. Being specific helps me understand!”

“I think what he _means,_ ” she says, every word dripping with so much pointed disapproval that it makes him roll his eyes, “is _why_ is it only two weeks?”

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“... Right.” She gives up, apparently; she sighs, and lets her wrist hang. He takes another bite. 

“It’s rude to start eating before everyone else at the table, you know,” she tells him.

“You’ve got your food,” he says.

“That’s not the point! It’s…” She sighs again, and shoves the device back into her purse. “Nevermind. Let’s just start over, okay? I want to make the most of this. Two weeks or not.”

The main theme of all the literature surrounding Hope’s Peak had been that the system works if you let it. Nothing is superfluous, even if it seems like it is. Everything happens for a reason. 

He swallows his bite, and leans back in the booth.

“... Fine.”

*

Mahiru is an amateur photographer following in her mother’s footsteps. It’s her first time in the system, too, and she’s about as sold on it as he is— which is to say, not quite. She offers him some of her risotto, and laughs when he refuses. “Big no to cheese, then,” she says, mixing the breadcrumbs into the rice. “Heard that one loud and clear.”

There’s a little, driverless cart waiting for them outside the restaurant when they’re finished. It pings both their devices when they get in, sets a navigation on its own, and takes them out into the sprawling grounds around the central hub. 

They ride in silence, cold winter air whipping in from under the plastic shields. He puts his feet on the dash, and she sighs, loud enough that it barely even counts as passive-aggressive. He doesn’t put them back down.

The route delivers them to an isolated cottage on the western side of the grounds. It’s on the small side, just a main living area separated from what he assumes is a bedroom by a half-divider. There’s a nook of a kitchen tucked into the southeastern corner, and an automated fireplace in the middle. It’s clean and nicely furnished, inviting while still managing to stay practical. 

Mahiru turns the corner into the bedroom. She stops short. “... Oh.”

He understands when he gets there. There’s only a single bed, made up in plush pillows and fluffy blankets. The bathroom hangs off the northern wall, separated by wide panes of lightly frosted glass.

The implication isn’t exactly fucking subtle.

“... I guess it’s understandable,” she says. “I mean, we _are_ meant to be in a relationship. It’s just a little...”

“For two weeks?” he says. “Fuck that.” He plucks the squat extra blanket off the end of the bed and steps back down into the main living area. “Take it. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“Don’t you know any other words?” she complains. “If you talk like that all the time, people are going to assume you have a bad attitude.”

“Let people think whatever they want,” he answers. “I don’t give a shit.”

“So you _do_ have a bad attitude, is what you’re saying.”

He turns on his heel. “What difference does it make to you? Do you _want_ to share the bed?”

She flushes, and glares at her feet. “Of- Of course not! Not… Not right away, at least. I appreciate you being a gentleman about it, but you could try actually _acting_ like a gentleman.”

“It’s only two weeks,” he tells her. He pulls out the back cushions of the couch and lines them up neatly behind it. “Don’t get so worked up over it.”

That shuts her up. She watches him make up the rest of it, her arms folded over her stomach. “You know,” she says, once he’s sat down, “you could try being a little more positive.”

“Whatever.” He kicks the decorative throw pillows off the end of the couch so that he can pull his legs up on it. Even for him, it’s a tight fit. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

*

Two weeks, it turns out, is a long, long fucking time.

*

They argue, constantly. She hassles him about his manners, his posture, the way he holds his fork. They never agree on what to do or where to go or when, and she absolutely refuses to give any ground, ever. She’s fucking _insufferable._

“You’re not my goddamn mother!” he shouts across the kitchen. “I don’t need you riding my ass all the time!”

“Yeah, well, maybe if you actually pulled yourself together for once, I wouldn’t have to!” He slams the mini-fridge shut, and she tosses her hands in the air. “See? This is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re such a child, you know that?”

“Usami,” he barks at the counter. 

The device lights up. “Yes, Fuyuhiko?”

“What are our options for ending a relationship?”

“Oh, that’s your solution?” Mahiru demands. “You want to run away instead of acknowledging that maybe, _maybe_ you have some issues you should be working through?”

“The relationship will end when time is up!” the device responds, cheerful.

He ignores her, and focuses on it. “Yeah, I’m not an idiot, I know that. I mean _before_ that.”

“All expiration dates are carefully calibrated in order to generate an accurate partner profile, which helps in selecting your Ultimate Match,” it answers. “Participants are not allowed to terminate a relationship before the expiration date has passed. Doing so would compromise the quality of the data provided to the system.”

He freezes. Across the room, so does Mahiru. “What?” she says.

“ _Ever?_ ”

“That’s right!”

“We’re stuck here for another fucking week?”

“That’s right!”

It waits for more input. After it goes a few long, excruciatingly silent minutes without getting any, it dims into standby.

“Look,” Mahiru starts, and that’s how it always starts, her same bullshit speech about having an open mind and trusting the system and, if you really listen, letting her drive their whole fucking relationship. He can’t listen to it again.

“Don’t,” he snaps. He shoulders past her, and grabs his coat from the hook. “I need some goddamn air.”

*

Natsumi agrees to give him an out, on the condition that he brings her a smoothie and walks around the park with her. He does it, because if he spends one more second in that tiny-ass cottage, he’s going to lose his fucking mind, and no amount of Natsumi squeaking her straw in her plastic lid is going to measure up ever again.

Her advice is, “Have you had sex yet? You should have sex,” and he gulps down way, way too much of his coffee. He manages not to spit it all down his front, and it scalds the back of his throat instead.

“God— _fucking_ dammit, Natsumi! Did you not listen to a word I said?”

“Yeah,” she drawls, “I listened to _all_ of it. She tells you to pick up your shoes sometimes and you’re a little bitch about it, I get it. If it’s such a lost cause, you might as well get _something_ out of it before time’s up.”

“I’m not gonna sleep with someone I hate!”

“Who cares about that? You said two weeks, right? I doubt the system was gunning for you guys to settle into gross domestic bliss anyway.” She slurps her smoothie. “Hatesex is a thing.”

“You’re fucking full of shit.”

“Be miserable, then! What else do you want me to say?”

He doesn’t have the chance to answer. There’s a shout behind them, and some girl skids past, nearly clipping Natsumi’s elbow. She fumbles her smoothie, and it sloshes purple all down her front.

“Hey!” she shrieks. “Watch where you’re going, bitch!”

“I’m sorry!” the girl shouts over her shoulder. She keeps running. “I’ve got a really important mission! No time to explain!”

He feels better after that.

*

“Yo, Usami,” he asks, when it’s just him in the cottage, two nights before the expiration. He sprawls out on the couch, and lets his head hang off the edge.

“Yes, Fuyuhiko?”

“What’s the fucking point of this?”

“The system evaluates your reactions to each of your relationships in order to build a complex—”

“No, I mean _this._ Me and her. Why put us together in the first place?”

“Everything happens for a reason.”

Could’ve seen that one coming.

She gets back not long after him. She walks right past him without looking at him, straight back into the kitchen. They’ve gone three days without saying a damn word to each other, and maybe that should feel like an improvement over the constant screaming, but it doesn’t. 

It feels pointless.

He sits up on the couch. “Hey.” She barely even reacts, just tilts her head enough that he knows she heard him. “Can I kiss you?”

She looks then. She glares, right over the curve of her shoulder. “Ex _cuse_ me?”

“For fuck’s sake, don’t make me say it again.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?” she snaps. “Are you seriously this petty?” 

“No! That’s not it. Just—” He gestures at his device, and hopes that gets the message across. “I’m fucking trying here, okay?”

She turns her glare down at the device, and then back up at him. Her jaw works. “... Fine,” she says, and then holds up a finger before he can get a word in. “ _One_ time. Understand?”

“Yeah, yeah.” 

She drops onto the couch beside him, except that she’s still too far away for him to do anything. He has to scoot to close the distance, and that makes her even more tense, shoulders drawn up and spine rigid. She stares back at him with that same, resolute glare she always wears, only now her face is a little pink, high on her cheekbones. It’d be cute, maybe, on literally anyone else. 

They sit in silence. He tries to psyche himself up.

“... Well?” she demands. “How- How long are you just going to sit there? If you lost your nerve, just admit it so I can at least—”

He mutters, “Fuck, shut _up,_ ” and crushes his mouth over hers.

And yeah, he was right all along: Natsumi is full of shit. 

It’s a bad kiss, and no weeks-old flare of physical attraction is enough to save it. Technically speaking, it’s fine, and contrary to what he expected Mahiru doesn’t just sit there like a dead fish; she tries maybe more than him, cupping his face in her hands and tilting him into a more comfortable angle. There’s just nothing there. It’s a wet, uncomfortable mess of lips with someone he hates.

It only lasts a few seconds before she groans and pushes him off. 

“That was terrible,” she says.

It’s the first and only time he’s ever agreed with her. She slides away from him, and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yeah, well. Now we know, huh? This whole thing was a fucking waste of time.”

She wraps her arms around her middle. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess it was.”

She stands up from the couch and goes to bed.

*

Two of the automated carts are sent out to pick them up on the last day. When the timer breaks five minutes, they separate into their individual rides, and wait for it to run out.

END


	2. Tenko Chabashira

1  
YEAR

Her partner slams her hand on the table. It makes both wine glasses rattle, enough that a dark-haired woman one booth over shoots a pointed glare across the divider.

“... Is that bad?” Peko asks.

“What?!” There are more heads turning in their direction. Her partner doesn’t seem to notice. “Of course not! It’s just the opposite: we hit the jackpot!” She shows Peko the face of her device, even though Peko is already looking at her own. “The system is built on data points, and we just got a whole year of them right out of the gate! Our profiles are going to have an _unbeatable_ foundation. Isn’t that right, Usami?”

“The system considers all relationships to be valuable experiences,” her device responds, “and they are all weighted appropriately when selecting a participant’s Ultimate Match.” 

“Right, but a year! That’s so much time! No matter what happens, it can’t _not_ be useful.”

“That’s right!”

She seems satisfied with that. She sets the device aside, and leans forward on both elbows. “Please,” she says seriously, “tell me everything! I want to know everything there is to know about you. Leave no detail out!” 

She smiles, eager and open. Everything about her is like that: she has warm, expressive eyes and animated body language. There’s a bright yellow headband with a flower decoration in her hair, and delicate ruffles on her blouse. Tenko, she said her name was.

Peko tries to think of a detail to share.

She draws a blank.

“Maybe,” she tries instead, “we could start with you?”

*

Tenko enthuses over everything: the food (both the herb-stuffed eggplant for her and the steamed sea bass for Peko), the automated transportation system, the spaciousness of their living quarters. She darts straight into the kitchen when they arrive, and checks through each and every one of the cabinets.

“It’s incredible! Look at this attention to detail! We have everything we could ever possibly need!”

“That’s right!” her device responds from her pocket, to her squealing delight.

Peko sets her purse on the kitchen island, and watches Tenko close all the cabinets again. “The system _is_ comprehensive,” she says.

“Of course!” Tenko rises up on her toes to reach the tallest shelf. “A 99.8 success rate doesn’t come from nowhere. This way, we have so much more time to really connect with each other!”

She is a budding martial artist, trained in Aikido. Her favorite color is green. She loves hot pot and live performances of all kinds, and she doesn’t know how to swim. She is energetic in the extreme, and Peko is already exhausted.

But all the introductory materials had assured her that the system works if you let it. A 99.8 success rate doesn’t come from nowhere. Everything happens for a reason.

“I was thinking about going for a run in the morning,” Peko says. Tenko whirls around, so suddenly and so eagerly that it catches Peko off-guard. “... Would you... like to join me?”

Tenko is enthused about that, too.

*

Their living quarters are far enough west that they can see the towering outer wall around the grounds from their front windows. That had been in the introductory materials, too: an isolated environment reduces the impact of any external confounding variables. Participants are only reintroduced to the outside world after their match has been made. 

The wall is tall enough that it throws wide, sprawling shadows across the grounds in the morning. Here, winter and spring are mild at worst, but the early morning chill is universal; she reminds Tenko to bring her ear warmers once while they’re getting dressed, and then again just before they walk out the door.

They run together, side-by-side. Tenko’s energy doesn’t diminish at all, even this early, before the sun has fully risen; Peko has to encourage her down from a breakneck pace to a moderate one.

She’d thought it would be a distraction, running with a partner. She’d thought it would be especially distracting to run with a partner like Tenko, all enthusiasm and little restraint. Instead, Peko finds it improves her focus, having someone matching her step-for-step.

“A record time!” Tenko announces, when they’re finished. “That was amazing!”

“It was our first run,” Peko says.

“Of course! And now we have a time to beat for our second!” Tenko scribbles the time on a scrap of paper, and stretches to tape it above the doorframe. “And I won’t rest until we have. Are you ready?”

Peko looks up at it. _09:23:05_ in round, bubbly characters.

“Yes,” she answers. “I think I am.”

10  
MONTHS

The weather warms. A stand in the park hands out cold drinks during the afternoon, so they go together; Tenko orders a lemonade, and Peko an iced tea. They sit on a bench and watch the half-grown ducklings chase each other on the water.

“You know,” Tenko says, fidgeting with the lid of her drink, “I didn’t forget.”

Peko has a plastic baggie of flaxseed in her purse; the ducklings hesitate when she tosses it out, but the draw of a free treat eventually bullies out their fear. They toddle toward her, scoop the seed up in their beaks, and then dash back to the waterline.

“Forget what?” she asks.

“Do you remember the night we met?” 

Peko does. It’s enough for her to know where the conversation is headed, and her stomach twists. 

“I said I wanted to know everything about you.” Tenko waits, but not for long. She snaps her nail against the lid. “It’s been almost two months and I still feel like I don’t know anything about you at all.”

“I’m sorry,” Peko says, and means it.

“No, no! I understand. It always feels like you’re so…” She grasps Peko’s hand and squeezes, once, in lieu of finding a word. Her fingers are damp with condensation from her cup. “Maybe we could… try again?”

In theory, there’s nothing to be concerned over. They’re simple enough questions about basic enough information. It’s just that none of those details feel important enough to tell, when it comes time to think of them.

“... I don’t mind,” she ventures, carefully. “But I don’t…”

“It’s okay! I’ll help you!” Tenko twists to face her, and pulls both legs up so that she’s kneeling on the bench, one elbow propped on the backrest. “What if I asked specific questions, would that make it easier?”

Peko isn’t sure it will, but Tenko’s face is undeniably earnest, so she says, “... Maybe?” 

“Okay! First question.” It takes her a second to think of it, but only a second. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Black,” Peko decides.

“Favorite food?”

That one is harder. There isn’t even a range of possibilities that jumps to mind. She flounders, and Tenko notices.

“Okay, okay, wait, how about… what do you like about the food the system picks for you?”

She thinks. “It’s… savory, I suppose,” she answers. It feels silly to say, but Tenko’s smile stays encouraging. “Rich in flavor. Sometimes spicy, but not too much.”

“Do you have a favorite animal?”

Peko looks at the ducklings, who have finished all of the flaxseed she tossed out for them. They waddle closer in nervous, eager circles.

“... do I have to choose?”

“You can say ‘all of them,’ if you want,” Tenko decides. Her smile broadens. “Do you like animals?”

“Well…” She hesitates. “Yes. I enjoy seeing them, and petting them, when I can. I…” Tenko is staring at her, her expression strange. “... What?”

Tenko says, “Um. Just, um, I…” and then she kisses her.

It’s startling, but not because of the kiss. It’s startling because Tenko’s kiss is nothing like her at all: hesitant and fluttering, there one moment and gone the next. Peko barely has a chance to react before Tenko has jerked her chin away, pink straight up to her hairline.

“Sorry,” she whispers in a rush. “I got excited, and- and you were so _cute,_ and—”

Peko squeezes her hand. “It’s fine.”

Tenko’s smile splits her face. She’s still pink when she kisses Peko again, unrestrained and slightly clumsy— but this time there’s all of her behind it.

*

They navigate the menus together. Main, Activity, Consent. There is a _Consent All_ option and a _Consent Specific_ option. Tenko insists on navigating through _Consent Specific_ and marking only the activities that label her the giving partner. “I- I don’t need anything like that,” she says. “I’m fine! This… This is for you!”

It seems like an uneven trade, and Peko tells her so. Tenko doesn’t budge. “Don’t think of it like a trade,” she says. “Think of it like a gift.”

They sit on the bed together, on top of the sheets, with the pillows piled up to support Peko’s shoulders. Tenko kneels in front of her, close enough to touch, her face flushed like she’s been running for hours and only just stopped.

She unties the silk bow at the front of Peko’s pajama bottoms. She bites her lip when she slides her hand inside the elastic. Her fingers are cold, through the thin cotton of Peko’s panties.

“Peko?” she whispers against her temple. Peko touches the back of her head to acknowledge it. She doesn’t trust her voice. “You’re not breathing.”

She’s right. Peko manually pulls a single breath in, and then manually pushes it back out. “I’m sorry.”

“R-Remember your breathing!” Tenko’s fingers are trembling, now. “It’s important! For- for…” Her voice wobbles into a whisper. “Um, for... s-sensation. And so you don’t pass out!”

Peko turns her face down into her shoulder. “I won’t pass out,” she promises.

Tenko swallows. When she whispers, “Well… good!” it’s almost a squeak. She shifts herself into a better position on the bed, up on her knees, her other arm slid around Peko’s back.

Tenko touches her. It’s hesitant, at first, but not slow. The angle is strange to start, and not quite right, but the longer she goes, the more Tenko relaxes. She flexes her wrist, and her fingers trip a spot that pulls sensation back like a hook from Peko’s bellybutton.

She thinks about her breathing. She thinks about keeping it steady. She thinks about keeping it in. She clenches her teeth and swallows each time it feels like it might spill out, for no reason she can think of other than _she must._

Tenko’s kisses get clumsier. The rhythm of her fingers gets less distinct, if not slower. The twisting key at the base of Peko’s spine winds, and winds, and winds…

And stops. 

There’s somewhere _more_ to go, she can feel it, like water crashing against a pane of glass or wind straining the edges of a tarp. Reaching for it is like straining to pull herself over a ledge, tipping at the top, seeing the other side, and slipping back down the face. 

For once, Tenko is steady. For once, she’s calm. “It’s okay,” she whispers into Peko’s neck, beneath her ear. “You can let go. Just feel.” 

Peko tries. She focuses on that thrumming coil of tension, and tries to imagine it snapping, letting all that energy out to vibrate through her, toe to tip. She tries to make herself feel it, only that, and nothing else.

Her fingers clench against Tenko’s hip. She thinks she must make a sound, a gasp or groan of frustration, because her throat suddenly feels rough, and Tenko suddenly lifts her head. She doesn’t have time to feel embarrassed or ashamed; in the next moment, Tenko’s mouth is on hers, deep and messy and desperate. She swirls her thumb in a quick, rough circle.

Finally, _finally_ — it snaps.

6  
MONTHS

Summer slides into fall. The grounds are picturesque, transitioning from lush greens to vibrant reds, oranges, and yellows over the course of a few weeks.

The system invites them to a pairing day. She’s never met the couple before, and neither has Tenko, but knowing them personally isn’t a prerequisite to be invited, as she understands it. “The pairing day is a celebration of the work the entire community has put in to helping participants find their Ultimate Match,” the device tells her. “It’s a party for everyone!”

They go. Tenko wears a pretty yellow dress that flares out from her hips like flower petals; Peko opts for something less eye-catching, a pencil dress in dark blue. The venue is a lodge deep in the woods on the northern side of the grounds, with roaring fireplaces to keep the cold out and wide bay windows to let the autumn colors in. There is a grand piano at the back of the ballroom, where a young woman plays a slow, delicate waltz.

It’s beautiful. 

It’s also overwhelming. 

Peko had known that the system's participant pool was large by design, but she's never seen so many people outside the central hub before now. There's food and drinks and dancing. The hum of idle conversation rises to a dull roar in her ears, too significant to tune out.

Even Tenko is intimidated. The piano transitions into a speedier, cheerful rhythm, and she hovers at the edge of the dance floor, fingers twisted in her skirt. Other guests twirl by her, hands intertwined, and she rolls back on her heels. 

“Would you like to dance?” Peko asks.

Tenko balks, with both hands up. “N-No! No, it’s fine. I’m... not graceful like you.” She bites her lip, and looks back out across the dance floor. “... But you definitely should! You would be amazing.”

“Even if that were true,” Peko says, and she suspects it isn’t, having seen the way Tenko runs, “why does it matter?”

“What’re you talking about? Why _doesn’t_ it matter?” Tenko splays her feet out and hikes her skirt to her knees, like forcing Peko to look at her legs will change her mind. “Me and my monster feet would just drag you down!”

“I don’t think so,” Peko says. “But even if you did… it would be fun anyway. Wouldn’t it?”

Tenko’s eyes are round. She looks at the dance floor again, and back. Out, and back. “R-Really?”

Peko holds out her hand, and Tenko steps into her chest, the plume of her skirt swirling around her calves.

*

The reception spills into the evening, and then into the night. The crowd never thins, at least not as far as Peko can ever tell. If anything, the room gets more crowded as the night wears on and guests retreat inside from the cold.

Tenko is riding the high of the evening. She gushes about the music and the decorations the entire ride back, and Peko’s head is throbbing.

“That was amazing!” Tenko hoists herself out of the cart one-handed when they arrive, and twirls on the pavement. “Ooh, I hope my pairing day is half as cute as that was!” Peko slides down the seat to pull herself out of the cart, too, and Tenko bounces toward her. “Here, let me help!”

She reaches for Peko’s hand, where it’s braced against the backrest of the seat.

Peko twists her wrist away. 

Tenko’s expression flickers. She steps back to give Peko room to step out of the cart herself. “Is something wrong?”

Peko answers, “No,” and it’s true; objectively, the night has been fine. It’s been wonderful, even, as picturesque as anything inside Hope’s Peak.

“It’s alright if you’re upset!” Tenko says, reaching again for her elbow. “It’s okay to be frustrated after a long day. I understand! You just need to let it out. If you want, I can—”

“I would like _space,_ ” Peko says, sharper than she means. 

“Oh.” Tenko looks down at her hands. She snaps them back to her side, and tucks them into the folds of her skirt. “Okay,” she says, only now her smile is strained. “Yeah! I- I can do that, too.”

The timer on the cart clicks over. Its electric motor revs and whirrs as it drives away.

“I’m sorry,” Peko says. “... I should go to bed.”

Tenko’s eyes soften. She nods. “It’s okay. I’ll be right behind you.”

*

It’s another hour or so before Tenko comes to bed. Peko feels her slide under the blanket, and then feels her stretching moment of hesitation before she nips close, one arm curled around her waist.

4  
MONTHS

Peko mentions that she’s never had a crepe before.

There is a cart that sells them in the park, even during the winter. Tenko likes the craftsmanship that goes into them, with delicate whipped-cream flowers and swirls of chocolate syrup. They’ve always looked too sweet for Peko’s tastes.

“But they aren’t all sweet!” Tenko insists. “There are savory ones, too. You’d really like those, I bet!” She slams her hands on the table, and both their devices jump. “I’ll go and get one for you right now! Wait right here!”

“No, that’s not—”

It’s too late. Tenko springs up from her chair and takes off down the hill. She nearly clips another girl on the way, and it throws a splash of dark purple smoothie down the girl’s shirt and into the grass.

“Hey!” The girl’s voice carries up the hill. “Watch where you’re going, bitch!”

Peko makes to stand up, but the situation doesn’t escalate beyond that. The girl moves on with her companion, and Tenko races back from the crepe cart.

“Here!” She presses it into Peko’s hands. It’s cheese, mushroom, and spinach. “I have to go,” she says. “I need to apologize! Wait here, I’ll be right back!”

The girl with the spilled smoothie is gone, as far as Peko can tell, but Tenko skids down the hill again regardless. Peko stands to follow; the park is not small, and it would be worse to leave her to search alone. 

Her device lights up when she picks it up off the table. The time remaining blinks up at her: four months.

It’s more a passing thought than a revelation: she thinks she’ll be relieved, once this is over.

She doesn’t crush it fast enough. Even when Tenko turns back to find her (“Did you see where she went?” she calls “Blonde hair, cute face, but like, cute-mean?”), the guilt that spills in doesn’t drown it. It wedges itself behind her sternum, deep and painful, and stays there.

2  
MONTHS

“There’s not much time left,” Tenko says one night, while they’re curled together on the porch swing. It’s too cold, almost, winter tendrils creeping back in, but not so much to drive them inside, just yet. She has her device balanced on her knees.

“Two months,” Peko answers.

“Less than that,” Tenko says. She taps her device, and it lights up: fifty-seven days. “But it’s okay. A whole year of data points! We’ll be right on our way to our Ultimate Matches!” She drags her thumb over the bottom curve of the 5. “But… It- It’ll be sad, a little. Right?”

It will be. Peko’s chest constricts, thinking about it. It throws her relief over the expiration into sharper focus: once it’s over, she’ll be able to move on.

“Peko?”

It was always going to end. They’ve been expecting it, from the very first night they met. But it would be cruel to say so, so she doesn’t say anything.

“It’s okay for you to let your feelings out,” Tenko murmurs eventually. “Especially with- with me.” She wipes the corner of her eye with her thumb. “... I hope you know that.”

She gets up from the swing. Peko watches her retreat inside.

She thinks Tenko must be tired, too.

6  
WEEKS

The days go faster at the end than they did at the beginning.

17  
DAYS

It can’t be fixed. Maybe it isn’t supposed to be fixed.

“Everything happens for a reason,” the device tells her.

1  
DAY

Tenko has always been a restless sleeper. She fidgets and sighs and tosses all night, not counting the time it takes for her to fall asleep in the first place.

Peko has slept under more trying conditions than that. She’d adjusted.

They both sleep poorly, that final night.

*

They spend their last few minutes out on the porch swing. It’s almost too cold, the last bit of winter fading out from early spring mornings, but together, it’s warm enough. Tenko has her device cupped in her hands. She watches the blinking timer count down.

“Peko,” she blurts. Her voice is trembling and too loud; she overcorrects, and cuts her volume to a whisper. “Could- Could I hold your hand? Just until the end. … If it’s alright with you?” 

Their devices begin to beep steadily. Less than a minute remaining.

Peko picks off her gloves, and laces their fingers together.

END


	3. Sonia Nevermind

36  
HOURS

He says, “What the fuck?” at the same time she says, “Oh, wonderful!”

He makes a face. He knows he does, because she laughs. Not at _him,_ maybe, but at _it_ definitely, a tittering sound behind her hand.

“I appreciate the inclusion of shorter timeframes,” she explains. “They are often bittersweet, yes, but they can also provide incredible insight. It is a…” She searches for a phrase. “... a ‘crash course’ of compatibility!”

“Well, I don’t get the fucking point,” he tells her. “What’s the system supposed to get out of a day and a half?”

“Everything happens for a reason,” she answers, excruciatingly earnest.

“Yeah.” His steak is so tender that he can’t even appreciate sawing at it. “Wonder where you picked that fucking gem up from.”

*

Her name is Sonia. Her menu selection is a brightly-colored vegetarian dish full of shit he’s never heard of, and she talks for a full ten minutes when he asks her about it. It’s not even bad; the fruit used as the base of the dish is only available in the winter (apparently) and can only be imported from overseas (apparently) making it such a distinct item that when a famous serial killer used its pips as a calling card (apparently), the police were able to use it to track him down (apparently).

The cottage is even smaller, this time around. There’s no kitchen nook or walk-in closet, just a cozy living area blocked off from the bedroom and a small cabinet of pre-packaged meals.

“You can have the bed,” he tells her. The extra blanket at the foot of it is the same style and brand as the last one, just in a different color. He can’t fault the system for consistency. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

She looks at him. He sits on the couch with the blanket draped over his lap, and her lips purse like she’s trying to keep something in.

“What?” he demands. “I said you can have the bed. You got a problem?”

Her eyebrows lift, and he sees something click into place behind her eyes. “Oh, I see,” she says. “Did you not want to have sex?”

She says it so plainly that he’s almost sure he heard her wrong. She’s completely without shame or discretion; she tilts her head at him, like it’s a question of a business transaction. He gapes. He sputters. She just stands there and waits for his answer.

“I- I’ve known you for two fucking hours!”

“Yes,” she says patiently, “and that leaves only thirty-four remaining.”

“That’s my fucking point! I’m not— You’re not— Is that seriously how you expected this would go?”

“Well, yes,” she says, slowly, like she doesn’t understand why he’d ask in the first place. “During my last brief relationship, we spent the better part of our time together having sex.”

“Well—” His throat is dry. He has to swallow halfway through, and his voice cracks. It makes his answer lose some of its punch. “ _Well,_ it ain’t gonna be like that with me.”

She nods once, crisp, and tucks her hand into her pocket to find her device. “If that is your choice, I understand, of course. However, I have found it beneficial for all parties involved when I am direct, so if at any point you change your mind…” She swipes on the face of it. It blinks and chimes. “I have consented to all activities and will renew as necessary.” 

His face is getting hot. He leans over to fluff the single throw pillow he left for himself, even though it’s already the consistency of a marshmallow. “Do whatever you want,” he says. “ _I’m_ going to sleep.”

She doesn’t even take it personally. “Of course,” she says, just as warm. “I will see you in the morning, then. Sleep well!”

He rolls over to face the back of the couch, and drags the blanket over his head.

*

They spend the next day in the park playing chess like a couple of old-timers. They’re split (he won the first game, she won the second and third, he won the fourth) when she spots a cart making crepes rattling its way down the path.

“Best three out of five when I return,” she says. “I insist! It has been so long since I found a worthy opponent. I must know who wins!”

She sprints up the hill to the little cart. She pulls her scarf off her neck when she gets there, flush with exertion and cold and excitement. He sees her tap through every potential ingredient on the touchscreen to get the system to explain them to her.

He fishes his device out of his pocket. 18:23:10.

The crepe she brings back is some kind of monstrosity. Strawberry and hazelnut, she tells him, beneath the mounds of chopped nuts and drizzled dark chocolate. She sits in her seat and holds it out over the chess table.

“I have read that it is customary for romantic partners to share food, especially snacks and sweets,” she says. 

“You read that,” he repeats.

“Yes.” She smiles, unselfconscious. “Would you like to try with me?”

He has one bite. It’s not bad.

(They play their tiebreaker, and she trounces him.)

*

“Motherfucker!” she shouts across the lake, one arm hooked through his. “Bullshit! The sons of bitches!”

“Don’t say _the,_ you’re not talking about a fuckin’ punk band.”

She sticks a finger in his face, so delighted it just about ruins the effect. “Fuck you!”

He can’t help the tug at the corner of his mouth. “There you go.”

*

They have dinner. She gets some kind of fish this time, and this time it’s sliced according to a specific technique indigenous to a small, isolated island (apparently) that was picked up by a cannibalistic cult on the other side of the world centuries later (apparently).

“Are you sure you will be comfortable on the couch again tonight?” she asks, when they get back. She sheds her coat and scarf and hat, and is punctual about hanging them all up. “I do not mind switching, if you would like.”

His device blinks 08:06:01 at him.

His fingers are shaking, but the touchscreen still responds the way it should. Main, Activity, Consent. He swipes across the face— _Consent All_ — and the chime makes Sonia turn her head.

“There,” he says, tongue thick in his mouth. The device clatters on the table when he drops it. “I consent.”

She doesn’t answer immediately. She folds her hands in front of her and studies him. “There is an itemized list also,” she says carefully, “if that would make you more comfortable.”

“I already said yes to all of it.”

“And you are sure?”

“Would I have done it if I wasn’t fucking sure?”

She smiles at him. She pulls on one end of the ribbon in her hair until it unwinds and spills golden strands down over her shoulders. “Based on my understanding of your personality after today,” she says, “I do not believe so, no.”

“Right. S-So.”

“So.” She steps out of her heels, so that she’s just in her stocking feet. It takes a solid two inches off her height, but she’s still easily taller than him. “Did you have something specific in mind?”

She’s walking toward him. She unbuttons the top of her dress, and it’s _stupid,_ it’s not like he can see anything besides a sliver of her throat, but he chokes on his own breath anyway. “Not— I mean, not really.”

“I see.” She’s close enough to smell, now. Her perfume is light and woodsy. She draws one finger up the length of his tie, until she can hook it into the knot at the top. “Then perhaps we should start with something familiar to us both?”

His brain is six steps ahead of him; he has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, until she pulls him by his tie, forward and up— and it’s kissing, just a kiss. 

She’s soft. He didn’t know people could _be_ that soft. It’s not just her lips and skin and hair (and it _is_ that, it’s a lot that), but also the smooth, round curves of her hips and back. It feels like she might collapse under his hands if he presses too hard, but she won’t. She’s soft, not delicate.

She steers him. At some point he’s missing his tie, then she shimmies him out of his jacket, and then she runs her hands through each and every button on the front of his shirt. By the time she’s urging him to tug his undershirt over his head, they’re already in the bedroom, the backs of his knees against the mattress.

“Sit,” she breathes against his lips, and he does. “Back,” she tells him, sliding open the remaining buttons down the front of her dress, and he does that too, until his shoulder blades hit the headboard.

The dress slides off her shoulders and pools around her feet. Her bra and panties are black, in the same style of swirling lace and trimmed in the same shade of pink. She has to bend to take off her stockings, and some slow-on-the-uptake corner of his brain panics that he can see clear down her front.

When she slides her underwear off her hips, the rest of it shuts off.

She crawls toward him on the bed. “Are you still comfortable?” she murmurs, when she’s close enough.

“Yeah,” he pants. “It's fine, alright?"

“May I continue?”

“Dammit, Sonia, you don’t have to say it like that…”

“Forgive me. I wish to be as clear as possible in times such as these.”

Her fingers find his belt. She works the buckle open, then the zipper, and the sound of both rattles in his ears. He needs a little encouragement still, somehow, and she dips to kiss his neck when she slides her hand down the front of his boxers.

“Fuck,” he hisses. “Your hands are so fucking cold.”

“Forgive me,” she says again, except this time he can feel her smile on his throat. “That is my mistake. I neglected to wear gloves today.”

He lifts his hips to help her drag his pants down and off. There is a neat stack of condoms already in the side table, along with plenty of other things that Sonia recognizes before he does.

She leverages herself up over him when she’s ready, her hands braced against the headboard. He looks up into her face, and she’s flushed just at the tip of her nose. She smiles, encouraging. She’s pretty. They get along. This is the point of short relationships like this one.

Her hips sink down.

*

When it’s over, she pulls her panties back on and sits cross-legged beside him on the bed. He gets water for them both, because he’d feel like an asshole only getting some for himself, but she doesn’t drink hers, only thanks him and holds it between her hands.

“Do you suppose the system ever makes mistakes?” she asks him.

He snorts into his glass. “Seriously?”

“What? Did I say something wrong?”

“That’s how you’re gonna open pillow talk with the guy you just fucked?”

“Oh!” She waves him off. “No, no. There was no mistake made with you, certainly. I actually believe we have both made a lasting friendship today, if I may say so.”

He rolls his eyes. “Nice recovery.”

“Thank you.”

The silence isn’t as heavy or as awkward as it could be; rain is pattering against the windows in a rhythmic, sleepy sort of way. It’ll be gone by the morning, probably. He hopes it is. It’ll be even more of a pain in the ass to move out of here if he has to do it in the icy winter rain. 

“I dunno,” he says. “A 99.8 success rate just means .2 percent gets screwed over, doesn’t it?”

She raises her glass to her mouth, but only touches the rim of it to her bottom lip. “I suppose it does,” she says softly. “... What a sad way of looking at it.”

“It’s not _sad._ It’s just math.”

She smiles at him. It’s flatter than normal. “Perhaps so.”

He finishes his water. He doesn’t know what to do with the glass, so he just leaves it there on the bedside table. When he taps the display of his device, it gleams 06:47:32 back at him, and counting down.

“We should go to sleep,” he says.

She leans over to check her own device. “Yes,” she answers. “I would like to be as well rested as possible, in the morning.”

She sets her glass on the opposite table and crawls beneath the covers. It feels too weird to stay there in the bed with her, so he takes the extra blanket and goes back to his place on the couch.

He can feel her eyes on his back when he goes, but she doesn’t try to stop him.

*

The sky is clear the next morning.

She wraps him up in a hug, out on the front step. “I wish you all the best,” she says. “Truly. Whomever the system selects for you, I am sure they will be magnificent.”

He lets one arm hook around her waist. “... Yeah,” he mutters into her hair. “Yeah, same to you.”

Their devices beep, simultaneously. The door behind them locks.

She turns and walks away.

END


	4. Hajime Hinata

4  
MONTHS

“Okay,” he says. “I… guess that’s normal?”

Peko knows it’s unfair of her to compare. Her mind makes the comparison anyway, if only because he is almost exactly everything Tenko was not. He is… mild. He doesn’t fidget. He has dark hair and pale eyes, and his dress shirt is wrinkled a bit at the collar. He smiles at her, nervous and lopsided, but unassuming.

“I kinda thought they would tell me… anything, I guess, before I got here. But they really do just dump you in, huh?”

“It does take some adjustment,” she agrees. “Is this your first time in the system?”

“Oh. Yeah. I thought— It’s not yours?”

“No.”

“Oh,” he says again. He looks like he wants to say something else, so she errs on the side of not interrupting— but then he doesn’t, and the silence keeps going.

The server brings their food. He gets a plate of pasta in a red sauce, and she gets what she discovers is duck, after the first bite.

They eat.

*

“I like the color black,” she tries, on the ride back to their living quarters.

His reaction is a flicker compared to Tenko’s supernova. His smile is confused, but his tone is earnest. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “I… guess I like orange.”

Tenko had taken that line of conversation on for at least another two or three minutes. She had made it feel effortless, natural, but now Peko can’t see the path she took.

They ride the rest of the way in silence. 

*

He lies stiffly beside her in the bed, his arms flat by his sides, so close to the edge that she thinks he may tip over it in his sleep. It seems excessive, but initially he had been reluctant to share the bed with her at all; she slides back to the edge of her side, too, when he doesn't relax.

“Hey, um.” The pause stretches too long. He’s unsure of her name, she thinks. “Peko?”

She hums. He rolls over to face her, his elbow tucked under his side in a way that looks, at best, uncomfortable. There’s a full arm’s length of space between them.

“Can I ask you about your other relationships? Or is that weird?” His voice takes on a wry slant, and she thinks it bends some of the rigidity out of him. “Kinda seems like this place doesn’t exactly follow normal rules.”

“I don’t mind,” she says. “But it was only the one.”

“More than me,” he answers. Even in the dark, she can see him frowning. “I was just wondering… I mean, what was it like?”

It’s a large question. Larger, certainly, than any of the bite-sized ones Tenko had asked her, to get to know her. She thinks, but can only picture Tenko the way she’d been the last time Peko had seen her: her face screwed up with emotion, her fingers laced through Peko’s.

“... I’m not sure,” she admits.

“You’re not sure,” he repeats, deadpan. “How can you not be sure? You were there, right?”

“We were together for a year,” she says, “and it ended only recently. It’s possible I’ve been too distracted to process it.”

“Oh,” he says. “... The turnaround is that quick, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

He shifts under the blankets. He’s looking towards her, still, but not at her anymore, his eyes focused and contemplative. The arm wedged beneath him wiggles out to curve more comfortably beneath his pillow.

“Well,” he says finally, long after she’d begun to think that was the end of it. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”

“... Why?”

“‘Why’?” he echoes, incredulous. “C’mon. You broke up. That’s not easy for anybody, even when you know it’s coming.” 

They have four months. Less than that, by hours. It will be well into summer when their expiration arrives, and they will have to do the same thing: walk away. With Tenko, the expiration had been nebulous and far-off; with Hajime, it’s closer, more concrete. She’s done it before.

His smile sobers somewhat. She wonders if he’s thinking about the same thing. “I don’t know,” he says, quieter. “Maybe especially then.”

“It is what it is,” she says. “Those are the rules of the system.”

“Yeah.” He rolls onto his back again, this time not quite so stiffly. “Everything happens for a reason, right?”

15  
WEEKS

She runs, still, in the mornings. Hajime prefers to sleep in (“Believe me,” he’d said, when she asked the first time, “You don’t want me there. I’d really just slow you down,”) so she runs alone now, circling the winding footpaths through the sector around their living quarters. It’s an adjustment, after so long running with a partner.

This sector has much less tree cover than the last one. They’re more central here, but she can still see the wall in the distance, eating through the bottom of the sky. It’s massive, that's all she knows. There had been no specific information in the introductory materials about the exact size of the grounds.

“Usami,” she says.

Her device is strapped to her left arm; it buzzes to acknowledge her. “Yes, Peko?”

“How far is the perimeter of the wall?”

“I’m sorry,” it says. “I don’t know the answer! Can I help you with something else?”

She considers. Rephrases to, “Is there a footpath that follows the inside of the wall?”

“I’m sorry,” it says again. “The maintenance road for the outer wall is out of bounds to participants. Failure to stay within the bounds of the community is considered a breach of system rules. Failure to comply with the system may result in banishment.”

That makes the decision for her. She runs an extra snaking loop around their sector to get the distance she needs, and meets back with Hajime for breakfast.

3  
MONTHS

There is a pairing day celebration held in a lush, rolling field just south of their living quarters. It’s lovely, picturesque like everything else, dotted with white and yellow wildflowers. There are rows of temporary seating, a delicate, open-air gazebo set aside for the ceremony, and a small piano stood up for outdoor music. It isn’t as compact as the previous pairing day had been, not technically, but the guests still crowd in clumps close to the center, near the food and music.

Hajime squeezes her hand when he helps her out of the cart. “I’ll get us some drinks,” he says. “Can you grab some food? I’ll meet you over there.”

He points to a tree somewhat removed from the main celebration, where the crowd is thinner and the noise is dimmer. 

She smiles. “Yes.”

*

The food selection is expansive: all cuisines and all flavors, to suit all palates. There are appetizers and small plates arranged on long tables, with servers refilling each as the guests pick them clean.

There are too many different options to achieve a comprehensive selection in one trip. Peko focuses instead on having a breadth of choices, evenly balanced between meat, fruit, vegetables, and dessert. There’s only one appetizer that she wants particularly more than the others: a bacon-wrapped persimmon she’s seen on a number of different guests’ plates.

When she gets to it, there is only one left on the serving platter. She had been in the middle of collecting a few pieces of celery and carrot sticks as palate cleansers, but as soon as she sees it, she doesn’t hesitate.

“Damn,” someone says across the table. “Okay then.”

When she lifts her head, there is a man in the line opposite from her, reaching for the same platter. She’s cut past him to reach the last persimmon, almost to the point of knocking his hand away with a stalk of celery.

“I’m sorry,” she says, drawing her hand back. “That was rude.” She gestures, palm up. “Please.”

“What? No. It’s yours.”

“I was being inconsiderate. You should have it if you like.”

“If you don’t take that thing right now, I’m gonna be pissed,” he tells her, only he’s smiling when he does. “None of these fuckers earned it, including me.”

“I wouldn’t say I did, either,” she answers. “It was more timing than skill.”

“Like that?” He mimes a slicing motion with one hand. “No way.”

She can feel her cheeks warming. “I’m sorry,” she says again, and tucks the celery between the edge of one of her plates and a mini cupcake. “That was… probably excessive.”

He rolls his eyes. “It got you what you wanted, didn’t it? Just take it.”

She doesn’t know what to make of him. He is boyishly handsome, with warm, round cheeks and a line of freckles across the bridge of his nose— but also hard-edged, sharp in his eyes and in his smile. He's dressed more formally than many of the other guests, but his manner is... unorthodox, for the nature of the event.

“It’s fine,” she says. “I don’t mind leaving it.”

The line is filling up behind them, on both sides. Other guests are starting to eye the platter as well. He plucks a bright yellow toothpick from a cup on the table and spears the last persimmon with it. “Yeah, well,” he says, “I do,” and drops it on his empty plate.

They process down the rest of the buffet. She does her best to keep both of her plates varied but balanced, selections of different appetizers on both of them. Hajime likes the vegetable skewers, so she takes one extra of those, and hopes no one thinks her taking more than her fair share.

The man on the other side of the table is watching her. He only has a handful of things on his plate; he doesn’t seem disinterested in the food, per se, maybe only picky. “Hey,” he says. “You been to one of these things before?”

“Just one,” she answers. “Last year.”

“Any chance you know when it gets fuckin’ bearable? Or at least when I’m gonna be able to get out of here?”

He is frank. Perhaps rude. He is not, however, wrong. “Transportation comes to start taking guests back to their living quarters after the main ceremony,” she says delicately.

He snickers, ducking his head. The vibration of it steals into the center of her chest. “Right,” he says. “So I should be lined up, is what you’re saying.”

They’ve reached the end of the table. Hajime is waiting for her. This is the moment she should excuse herself and leave this man to the rest of his afternoon— but she lingers, and he looks up at her, and she should ask him his name, at the very least, to be polite.

His eyes shift away from her face and rise beyond her shoulder. They’re pale hazel. They might be green at the center; he’s not close enough for her to properly tell. “Incoming,” he says, “six o’clock,” and pops a puff pastry from his plate into his mouth.

She turns, and then Tenko is wrapping her in a hug, arms around her middle and chin hooked over her shoulder. She spins Peko once, with a squeal, and launches into a fast-paced summary of the time they’ve been apart.

When Peko looks back at the table, the man is already gone.

*

Tenko introduces her to the pianist behind the music. She’s a warm blonde woman with a heart-shaped face and an easy smile. Something about her makes Peko uncomfortable. “Kaede,” she says. She has a firm, confident handshake. “It’s nice to meet you finally. Tenko talks about you a lot.”

“I see,” Peko says. “Are you with the Hope’s Peak staff?”

“Oh!” Kaede’s smile is embarrassed. “No, nothing like that. I’m a participant, too. I just asked to take over the music a few times a month. As many times as the system will let me, anyway.” 

She points above her shoulder, and Peko realizes that the music has not stopped, even though Kaede has stepped away from the piano. The sound is coming from a tree branch above their heads. “Usually they just pipe music in over the speakers, like this,” she says. “But I don’t think that has the same ambiance, you know? The pairing days are so important. If I can help make it a little more special, I want to.”

“Do you remember the pairing day we went to, Peko?” Tenko gushes. “Kaede played the music there, too!”

She clasps Kaede’s hand, arm wound around hers to lock them together, and Peko understands, much too late, where the nagging, unpleasant sensation in her chest is coming from.

“I do,” she answers anyway. “You’re very talented.”

Kaede’s smile strains a bit. “Thanks.” She unwinds herself carefully, so that the two of them are only holding hands instead, fingers laced. Peko imagines it's for her benefit more than theirs. 

“We shouldn’t hold you up, though,” Kaede says. “You look like you’ve got somebody waiting for you.”

“Oh.” Peko looks down at her plates, still on the table by her hip. “Yes.”

*

She finds Hajime spreading a big, checked blanket on the grass beneath the tree. He has to do it one-handed, his other arm curled precariously around their drinks. “Hey,” he says, smiling, straightening up to meet her. “You were gone for a while.”

“I’m sorry. I… ran into someone, at the buffet table.” 

“That’s okay. It gave me time to find this.” He tugs one corner of the blanket with the ball of his foot. “I figured it’d be better than sitting straight on the grass.” He holds his free hand out for a plate. “Can I just take either one?”

She says, “Yes,” and they trade— he takes the plate closest to him, and she takes the tall glass of champagne from his elbow. They sit together on the blanket, and it’s nice, spending this time with him, separate from the crowd of guests. They’re far enough away that the rise and fall of the live music fades to indistinct at the edge of her hearing.

She holds her food in her lap. A cool spring breeze washes over her, and the afternoon sun warms her shoulders from behind. Hajime tells her how he’d seen the paired couple at the bar, about how over-the-moon they’d been, and how eager they’d been to share it with everyone else.

“It was kind of intense,” he says, and plucks one of the extra vegetable skewers from his plate. “That’s the point, I guess, but…”

It isn’t until the skewer has been moved away that she sees it: a single bacon-wrapped persimmon, tucked beside the sliders at the edge of his plate, speared with a bright yellow toothpick.

She says, “Oh,” before she can think not to.

He’s chewing. “What’s up?” he asks, behind his hand. He follows the line of her gaze down. “Did you want something?”

“I forgot,” she says. “There was… one thing.” 

“Which one?”

“... The persimmon.”

He searches. “Oh! Yeah, no problem.” He picks it up by one end of the toothpick, and sets it on the center of her plate. “There you go.”

She understands why they were such a popular choice of appetizer, when she bites into it; it bursts salty and sweet on her tongue, perfectly balanced. She glances back out towards the rollicking center of the celebration, but she can’t find him in the crowd, from here.

She doesn’t see him again that night.

7  
WEEKS

Her relationship with Hajime is not her relationship with Tenko. It’s an obvious conclusion that’s taken her much, much too long to reach.

They spend the morning in the central hub’s multi-level library. He shows her a book filled with glossy photos of South American animals, specifically the pages dedicated to the Tamarin monkeys and their range of different coats and colors.

“I don’t know,” he says, as she smooths her thumb over the corner of one of the pages, “I kinda liked it. I thought maybe you would, too.”

She does.

They have lunch in the restaurant one floor below, and stop for ice cream in the shop around the corner. Both times, Hajime opens his mouth to order, and is cut off by the staff handing him his choice.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to all this,” he tells her, on their way out.

“To what?” she asks. “The amenities?”

“Yeah, I guess.” They stop to wait for a cart to pick them up from the departure dock. “And— all of it, maybe. The whole… system.”

“You don’t like it?”

“No! It’s not- It’s not like that, I just…” His smile is an unhappy twist of his mouth. “I… thought for a while they weren’t going to let me in. The, um, participant pool is really selective.”

She sees where the pieces fit together. He’s less colorful than some of the other participants, perhaps— but so is she, and he’s certainly more interesting than she is.

“But they did,” she says.

He exhales, turning his face away to squint down the curve of pavement. “Yeah. I guess that’s what’s important, right? I’m here now.” He brushes her hand with the edge of his. “I… I get to be with you.”

She lets his fingers curl around her palm.

3  
WEEKS

He checks the time remaining every morning. It never changes, it will never change, but he still leans over to tap his device right after he wakes up, to watch the number peer back at him. It's a familiar urge. She can't fault him for it, but she knows from experience that it will hurt him before it comforts him.

She stops him, finally, after he’s done it every day for a week and a half. She catches his hand before he can reach the side table and draws it back between them, back into the warmth of the blankets.

He looks at her. He twists his hand out of her grip, and sets it against her cheek instead. 

He kisses her, close-lipped, and it’s different from all the times he’s kissed her before. He pulls himself closer, instead of leaning over the space between them, and he’s firmer, surer— about himself, she thinks. She hopes, about himself.

He slides between her knees. This is like every time before, but also not: it’s quiet, gentle, and slow, but also focused, emotional, almost overwhelming. His hands tremble where they clasp around her hips. He pulls himself up to look her in the eye, and even something as simple as that is like a tidal wave crashing over her.

There’s so much there. There’s a depth to his eyes that he’s always skirted around, or maybe she has, or maybe both of them have. She tries to find an answer for it, somewhere around the sinking feeling in her heart, and can’t.

He gasps her name into her neck when he comes, such a full, cracking sound that it sucks all the breath out of her. She holds him while he rides it out, cups both hands around the back of his neck where sweat has sprung up along his hairline, and squeezes her eyes shut against the bloom of shame that fills her chest.

He looks up at her after, a sated, hazy smile spilling across his face. 

She keeps holding him until it’s time to get ready for breakfast.

10  
DAYS

Hajime is a good man. His personality is a good match with hers. They read together in the den, shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch, warm summer breezes spilling in from the open windows, and it’s comfortable. It’s fine.

He touches the back of her hand. When she looks up, he’s smiling at her, warm, relaxed, affectionate, and it is only fine. “Hey,” he says. “I was gonna grab something to eat. You want anything?”

“No,” she answers softly. “Thank you.”

00:04:34

“Can I kiss you?” he asks, before she opens the door. “Just… one more time. If that’s okay.”

She shouldn’t. It would be unfair of her, when the balance of her feelings against his is so skewed. But there’s only a few minutes left on the timer, and the relationship hasn’t been unpleasant, just ill-fitting. 

She nods.

It’s a sweet, simple kiss. He doesn’t press into her, just bends carefully and brushes his lips against hers, one hand against her cheek. “Thanks,” he murmurs. He tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear before his hand drops away, and she realizes that he must already know. “I’m ready.”

They step outside to wait together.

END


	5. Rantarou Amami

8  
MONTHS

“Fuck,” he says, dropping the device back to the table, “ _finally._ ”

The guy laughs. It's a deep sound that rolls in his chest. “Well,” he says, “that’s quite a reaction to live up to.”

He looks like a sleaze, honestly. He’s sunk down in the booth, both arms stretched out across the backrest, the most relaxed Fuyuhiko's ever seen anyone in this stupid restaurant. He has an easy smile, and a row of piercings in one ear. Rantarou.

“Jury’s still out on you,” Fuyuhiko tells him. Rantarou only smiles and holds up both hands. “I’m just sick of the system saddling me with short expirations all the damn time.”

Rantarou frowns back down at the device, like he's already forgotten what it said. “Eight months, huh?" he says. He sounds skeptical.

"What?" Fuyuhiko snaps. “That's the longest I’ve ever had.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, _really._ Why? What’s the longest you’ve ever had?”

Rantarou’s eyes slide away. He smiles. He laughs. “Ah, well,” he says. “It’s all relative, isn’t it?”

“A number’s a number,” Fuyuhiko points out.

“Don’t know if I agree with that." Rantarou puts his nose in his glass of wine. It covers the edge of his smile. “Not in this context, anyway. Something that lasts a few days can feel longer than something that lasts a few years, you know what I mean?”

That’s not an answer, either. But then the food comes, and Rantarou changes the subject to how he’s gotten the same shrimp scampi three times now and whether he should be worried what that means, and Fuyuhiko lets it go.

*

The cottage is bigger than any of the ones he’s had before; it makes more sense to call it a house than a cottage, realistically. It has a full service kitchen, a sectional couch, and the fireplace at the center has a wider mantelpiece. It lights up when they walk in, to chase out the winter chill.

They have a standoff over the bed.

“This is always a little more complicated when it’s with two guys, huh.” Rantarou laughs, sort of, a huff more than any real laugh. “I really don’t mind taking the couch the first couple weeks.”

“Don't be stupid,” Fuyuhiko shoots back. “I already said I'd take it.”

He sighs, and smiles. “Alright, alright. We’re clearly not getting anywhere on this. So why don’t we just share it?” He must anticipate the retort that bubbles straight up from Fuyuhiko’s throat, because he holds both hands out like he’s trying to calm a tiger. “ _Hey,_ okay, hear me out at least.”

Fuyuhiko clamps his arms across his chest, and manages to keep his mouth shut. 

“You don’t have to worry,” Rantarou says. “I’m not trying to proposition you or anything. I really do mean just sleeping, half for you and half for me.” He gestures to the mattress. “Looks big enough, right?”

Fuyuhiko looks. It _is_ big enough; the both of them could probably sleep comfortably with space left over. It feels presumptuous, inappropriate, but the system doesn’t leave them with a lot of options, and his back is fucking _killing_ him.

His face is getting hot. He glares at the wall, but can still see one side of Rantarou’s lopsided smile in his periphery.

“... Fine.”

31  
WEEKS

Rantarou keeps his word. He doesn’t try anything fresh. He never gets handsy, not even by accident, in the middle of the night. Every morning, he’s exactly where Fuyuhiko remembers him being when he went to sleep: in a controlled sprawl on his stomach, sequestered on his own side of the bed.

He never tries anything.

Ever.

7  
MONTHS

They have lunch with Natsumi. It’s her idea, not theirs.

Rantarou hadn’t seemed enthused about it. He hadn’t said no, though, just stayed fidgety and noncommittal when Fuyuhiko brought it up, so Fuyuhiko made the decision for them. He’s barely seen her in weeks; she’d been over-the-top enamored with her last boyfriend when she’d been with him, some punk who sucked at playing the guitar.

She’s just gotten done ripping him a new one, now that she’s not.

Rantarou smiles. He listens attentively, and laughs at the right times. Natsumi seems to like him, anyway; she eats from his basket of fries and leans forward conspiratorially. “You know,” she whispers behind her hand, too loud for Fuyuhiko not to hear, “my brother might _seem_ like an insufferable prude, but he’s been really opening up to people lately! If,” she can’t suppress her cackle, “you know what I—”

“Al _right,_ ” he says loudly, and she laughs for the next ten minutes straight.

She gets assigned her next relationship in the middle of their lunch. She has six more hours to get ready, but she still sweeps what’s left of her food into a to-go bag and leaps up from the table.

Rantarou calls, “It was nice to meet you,” at her back, and she raises a hand in a messy half-wave over her head. 

They sit in silence after she’s gone. Fuyuhiko grinds his hands into his eyes. Rantarou drags a fry through his cup of ketchup. 

“She seems sweet,” he says, after a moment.

“Shut up.”

His smile is at least sheepish. “Sorry. I’m just teasing you.” He pushes the basket closer to Fuyuhiko’s hand. He lasts about ten seconds before he reaches for one. “You guys have a good relationship, I can tell.”

“Yeah,” Fuyuhiko scoffs, “so good that she never figured out how to keep her nose out of my fucking business.”

Rantarou laughs his exhale laugh, the one that doesn’t go any further than that. They sit in silence again, but it’s better this time. Comfortable. They share what’s left of the fry basket, fingers tripping over each other through the paper.

After a minute or two, Rantarou says, “Hey.”

When Fuyuhiko turns his head, Rantarou is sitting up in his seat, one elbow on the table, way, way closer than he’d been a minute ago. 

Fuyuhiko’s “Yeah?” falls apart in his throat.

Rantarou smiles at him, softer this time. He steadies Fuyuhiko's chin with the tips of his fingers, and then he kisses him.

It's soft and brief, his lips still salty and a little sweet. Their first kiss after a month together, and Fuyuhiko still has his hands in a fucking fast food basket.

Rantarou pulls back, drops his hand. “You ready to go?” he asks, and then he just stands up from the table, like he’s not the most fucking confusing, infuriating person on the goddamn planet.

6  
MONTHS

One day he wakes up, and he’s the one who’s rolled over the boundary between their halves of the bed. It’s not much, his fingers tangled in the bottom of Rantarou’s shirt and his forehead pressed against the edge of his shoulder, but it’s also not nothing.

His heart pounds. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. Rantarou doesn’t like touching much, it turns out, at least not touching like _that,_ and Fuyuhiko _isn’t_ touching him like that, not right this second, but maybe if he hadn’t woken up in time, then—

“You don’t have to move,” Rantarou says, without opening his eyes. He lays one hand on Fuyuhiko’s waist. He’s smiling, the fucker.

“Shut up,” Fuyuhiko mutters into his shoulder, and Rantarou lets the rest of his arm slide around him.

25  
WEEKS

With Mahiru, it was a trainwreck. With Sonia, it was fine, but too short to solidify into anything that _felt_ like something.

He likes this better.

3  
MONTHS

The pairing day is a pain in the ass, though.

It’s Rantarou’s fault. He’s the one that makes the argument to go. He tells Fuyuhiko it’ll be fun, that the system always arranges them like fancy dates, and then he fucking ghosts within the first five minutes. 

He stops short when they’re navigating through the crowd of arriving guests. He hesitates, his expression tense— then he catches Fuyuhiko looking, and all of that tension melts back into a smile. Not an encouraging one. A placating one.

“Hey,” he says. “Sorry about this, but there’s someone I really should go say hi to. Shouldn’t take long. I’ll come find you in a minute, alright?”

He lets go of Fuyuhiko’s hand, and the crowd swallows him up.

*

He gets food. It’s the only thing he can do in a place like this by himself, in-between all the squealing chit-chat and sappy decorations; he can at least always be sure that the system never skimps on the buffet.

He lines up. There’s girl in the line on the other side of the table who takes two plates from the top of the stack; one for her and one for her partner, he guesses. She sets them next to each other on the table in front of her, and maneuvers them down with her as she goes, putting things on them one by one, piece by piece.

(He only takes one plate. If Rantarou wanted food, too, he should have asked before bolting.)

They move down the line. He catches himself looking up more than once, to see what she’s doing. 

In his defense, it’s hard not to; she’s taking the whole buffet thing to a whole other level. Most people just take whatever’s in their reach that looks good, but she weighs and evaluates all of her options before she puts something on her plate. She takes time with all the platters everyone else is skipping over. She rotates through different types of food: meat, fruit, vegetables, desserts.

He doesn’t have that level of dedication. He’s not even sure what he came here to get. He looks at the spread again, all meticulous presentation and bright colors, and there’s an almost-empty platter right in front of him. It looks like a persimmon, wrapped in bacon. There’s only one left, so he goes for it.

Or he was going to, until the girl cuts in with a stalk of celery like a fucking fencing foil, and slices past his hand to the center of the platter without an ounce of hesitation.

“Damn,” he says. “Okay then.”

She looks up like she’s only just realized he was there. “I’m sorry,” she says, her fingers snapping away from the platter. “That was rude.” She holds her hand out, and it takes a second for him to understand that she’s done a 180, and now she wants him to take it instead. “Please.”

“What?” He scoffs, but her expression doesn’t change. “No. It’s yours.”

“I was being inconsiderate,” she says, excruciatingly polite. “You should have it if you like.”

“If you don’t take that thing right now, I’m gonna be pissed,” he tells her. It was a hell of a power move, what she did. She at least deserves to eat the damn thing. “None of these fuckers earned it, including me.”

“I wouldn’t say I did, either. It was more timing than skill.”

“Like that?” He copies her celery slice. “No way.”

She looks like he just caught her with a flashlight in the middle of the night. She’s pale enough that her cheeks go pink in no time flat. It picks up the color of her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She ducks her chin to hide it, and fiddles with the edge of her plate. “That was… probably excessive.”

He presses her. There’s a spark she’s letting wink out, and it annoys him. “It got you what you wanted, didn’t it? Just take it.”

“It’s fine,” she answers. “I don’t mind leaving it.”

He’s frustrated. She’s frustrating. There are people starting to crowd them, gunning for the chance at the last one too, and he’s sure as shit not going to let _that_ happen. “Yeah, well,” he says, and grabs a toothpick from the complimentary cup on the table. He snags the persimmon before anybody else can get their grubby hands on it. “I do.”

Her eyes linger on it when he drops it on his plate, but she doesn’t say anything. 

That’s that.

She goes back to organizing her own food. She isn’t so laser-focused on it anymore, though, which is both kind of disappointing and— something. It feels like she’s always just about to look up at him again, which might have something to do with the fact that he’s still staring at her like a creep.

He focuses on the food. So fucking much of it has cheese or cream cheese or whipped cream or creme fraiche. He picks his way through the rest, mostly meat on skewers and overly fancy cakes.

Then he looks at her again.

He doesn’t know what to make of her. She’s intense almost to the point of severity, with high cheekbones, pale hair, and bright, focused eyes. She looks like the type of girl who would knock you down on the sidewalk and then call you a bitch for scuffing her heels, but instead she’s soft-spoken. Gentle. Polite. 

“Hey,” he says. “You been to one of these things before?”

“Just one,” she says, and her eyes rise just enough to acknowledge him. “Last year.”

“Any chance you know when it gets fuckin’ bearable?” he asks, even though he knows the answer is probably _whenever your boyfriend decides to show up again._ “Or at least when I’m gonna be able to get out of here?”

She thinks about it. She turns her face away, towards a platter of mini-quiches to her right— and then she smiles. Barely enough that 'smile’ might not even be the right word for the way one corner of her mouth curls into an edge, but it still flips something over in his stomach.

“Transportation comes to start taking guests back to their living quarters after the main ceremony,” she says, and it’s so pointedly noncommittal that he can’t help the laugh it startles out of him. 

“Right,” he says. “So I should be lined up, is what you’re saying.”

She doesn’t have a chance to answer; the table ends, abruptly, or at least it feels abrupt to him, and they both hover awkwardly at the heel of it. It was a nice conversation. It’d be rude to just walk away. He doesn’t even know her name.

Behind her, there's another girl shoving her way toward the table. At first he thinks she’s just that eager to get at the spread, but she’s charging for the wrong end of it, and her eyes are focused too high.

He fishes the first thing he can reach off his plate, some kind of flaky pastry stuffed with prosciutto. “Incoming,” he says, “six o’clock.”

She turns. The other girl hits her so hard he’s surprised she doesn’t launch them both onto the buffet table; it’s really only thanks to celery-girl and the way she holds her ground that they don’t. She takes the hit-slash-hug like an athlete, and her hip only nudges the table from the force of it.

Both of her plates are still hanging off the edge, though. They teeter, precarious, with all the crap she’s piled on them. All it’ll take for them to tip over is one more energetic outburst from the tackle-girl, who’s been looking like she’s the edge of about five or six the whole time she’s been here.

People are starting to bump his shoulder pointedly when they walk around him. Tackle-girl is asking if celery-girl has been back to the gardens yet, and if she’s seen how they’ve started to come into bloom. (Celery-girl has not.) The blonde behind them is the only one watching when he leans over the table to tug the plates back toward the center.

Nobody is when he drops the persimmon from his plate onto hers.

*

He finds Rantarou beneath the mouth of the old gazebo. It’s a run-down looking thing, with rusted joints and peeling white paint. It has to be on purpose; Hope’s Peak rakes in enough money that they could put in something new, if they really wanted. Instead they picked this, some fake idea of legacy.

“There you are,” he says. “Where the hell did you go?”

Rantarou looks at him a fraction of a second too early. His face is drawn, pale, unhappy. There are lines around his mouth and eyes that Fuyuhiko’s never seen before, dark ones that look like they were carved there. 

They make eye contact, and it’s gone. He smiles like a wall coming up.

“Sorry,” he says. “Time must’ve gotten away from me.” He holds his hand out. “Did you get something to eat?”

Fuyuhiko doesn’t take it. “What’s going on with you?”

Rantarou puts his hand back in his pocket. Other than that, he doesn’t flicker. “Just a disagreement with a friend,” he says. “You don’t need to worry about it. We’re on a date, aren’t we?”

Fuyuhiko feels his jaw clench on its own. “What,” he says, “I’m just supposed to ignore whatever the hell this is?” He waves one hand from Rantarou’s feet to his head. “Do you think I’m fucking stupid?” 

People are starting to look at them. Some of the plain clothes security guards at the edge of the party lean in to whisper to each other. They’re not subtle, because they’re not trying to blend in; they’re dressed that way for the aesthetic of the pairing day, not to make themselves less intimidating.

“Fuyuhiko,” Rantarou says, and his smile strains. _Good._ “I really don't want to talk about it. Okay?”

One of the guys has turned down the center aisle. He walks toward them row by row, his hand on his belt. There’s a heavy taser hanging off one of the loops.

Rantarou holds his hand up. “We’re fine here,” he says, and he _smiles,_ always with the goddamn fucking smile. “Sorry to make a scene.”

The guy looks at Fuyuhiko. He grits his teeth. “Yeah," he says. "Fine.”

The girl at the buffet table told him he’d have to wait until after the ceremony before he could leave.

He lines up.

11  
WEEKS

Rantarou asks him for space.

In his defense: Fuyuhiko lets him have it, at first.

10  
WEEKS

“I got something I wanna say.”

They’re reading together in bed before it’s time to go to sleep, each of them on their own halves of the mattress. They’re not touching. They’ve kept sharing the bed the last few weeks, but it’s been more like it was at the beginning, with a strip of unoccupied space down the middle.

He’s been prepping what he wants to say for days. He’s been staring at a single word on a single page of his book for the past ten minutes trying to hang on to the opening lines of it, and he’s not even sure what the word he’s staring at _is._

Rantarou looks at him. He closes his book without marking the page. “Alright.”

He just has to say it. He just has to start.

“I’m not pissed because you won’t tell me whatever it is you’re not telling me,” Fuyuhiko blurts, and that’s not at _all_ the way it sounded in his head. He clenches the pages of his book and powers through. “If it’s not my business, it’s not my business, alright? You shouldn’t have to tell me anything. That’s not the point.” 

He forgot to breathe. He even reminded himself beforehand, and he still forgot. Rantarou still doesn’t interrupt.

“I’m _pissed,_ ” he manages, “because we’ve spent all this goddamn time together and you still expect me to act like I don’t notice when something’s bothering you. Like I’m supposed to just— let it fucking slide! I mean.” His throat is dry. He swallows, reflexively. “What’s the fucking point of this, if you don’t even trust me enough to let me help you?”

That’s it. He’s finished. The silence is ringing, and by the time a few seconds have gone by, he realizes Rantarou might not know he’s finished.

“... That’s it,” he mutters.

Rantarou exhales. It isn’t a laugh. “You’re really something else,” he says softly. “Has anybody told you that?”

Fuyuhiko looks at him. Something about his face makes Rantarou smile.

“Three years,” he says.

“What?” 

“You asked me what my longest relationship was. Before.” He leans over to put his book on the bedside table. “It was three years.”

Three _years._ He didn’t even know the system generated relationships that long. The introductory materials were never specific about maxes or mins, but he’d always assumed the longest ones capped out at a year, maybe a few months more than that. _Maybe._

He only says, “Oh,” like a dumbass.

“It didn’t feel that long, though,” Rantarou goes on. “Felt like days. Hours. Like it was there and then it was gone. A relationship like that… it sticks with you. Good or bad, right or wrong. You don’t just dust it off and move on to the next one, when something like that ends.” 

The thing is, Fuyuhiko isn’t stupid. He knows the shape of something when it’s sitting right in front of him, or at least he likes to think he does. Maybe he should have seen the shape of it before now. Maybe it was always there. But now that his nose is down in it, he can’t see it as anything else.

“I like you,” Rantarou says, and the smile this time is pathetic, but at least it’s _real._ “Lame thing to say after six months, isn’t it? But I do.” He shakes his head. “That’s not an excuse, by the way. I should have been honest with you about this from the start. But I did want it to work. I wanted to let go of whatever else was in the past.”

The smile fades. The lines in his face are the same ones Fuyuhiko saw under the gazebo. His eyes are meaningful, in the worst possible way. 

“But I didn’t,” he says softly. “I can’t.”

It’s supposed to feel like having a rug pulled out from under him. It’s supposed to be a stake to the chest, a trap door under his feet, a knife in his gut. It’s supposed to _hurt._ It’s supposed to do _something._

He feels like all the blood in his arms and legs has rushed out of him, to— he doesn't even know. Nowhere. It’s cold. His fingers tingle like he’s spent the whole night sleeping on his elbow wrong and he needs to shake the feeling back into it. He thinks someone could cut his palm open and he’d barely notice.

“Nobody deserves to be treated like that,” Rantarou is saying. “Like a distraction, or like a stand-in. That’s on me. I’m sorry.”

“Stop,” Fuyuhiko says, finally, with as much breath as he can find, “ _fucking_ talking.”

He does. He shuts his mouth, and just sits there in the silence, for long, painful minutes. Eventually, he swings his legs over the side of the bed and pushes himself up to standing. 

“I’ll sleep on the couch tonight,” he says, bending down to take the extra blanket off the footboard. “See you in the morning.”

7  
WEEKS

Rantarou never comes back to the bed.

Good fucking riddance.

3  
WEEKS  


People can say what they want about the short expirations; at least with Mahiru he only had to wait a few days for it to be over. 

1  
DAY

He thinks maybe something will change the last night. Maybe Rantarou will push his luck and show up in the doorway of the bedroom. Maybe Fuyuhiko will be pissed, but maybe also he’ll let him. It’s one night. There’s only one night left.

Nothing happens. He falls asleep staring at the ceiling.

*

They stand apart outside the house while the timer ticks down.

When it’s over, they leave.

END


	6. Sakura Oogami

36  
HOURS

Peko sighs.

“I suppose I can see how it could be disappointing,” her partner says. 

Her name is Sakura; she is a tall, broad woman with a weathered face and intense eyes. She is striking, and Peko realizes she’s given her the wrong impression. 

Sakura’s tone had been wry, not unkind, but her understanding shouldn’t excuse Peko’s misstep. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That was rude. I’m not disappointed, I…”

She realizes mid-thought that the truth is possibly even more of a social faux pas. Sakura only looks at her steadily, and Peko fumbles her words. The pause stretches long enough to be unnatural, and then long enough to be awkward.

All she can think to say is “... I’m sorry,” again.

Sakura isn’t offended; she smiles, a calm slant of her mouth on one side, and lays her napkin out over her lap. “It’s fine,” she says. “There’s no need to apologize.”

“But—”

“The system moves you quickly from one relationship to the next,” she says. “There’s little time for recovery or reflection in between. It’s a relief to have a short period where expectations can stay relatively low.”

Peko finds herself staring. “Yes.”

“You are my seventh relationship,” Sakura says. “I understand.”

The server stops by their table. They’re given the same meal for dinner: oven roasted lamb chops with a mint chimichurri, medium rare. It’s delicious, if imperfect for the both of them. Sakura comments that hers is overcooked; Peko counters that hers is undercooked. Sakura suggests that they swap, but both plates are almost exactly the same, and trading hardly makes a difference at all.

"Perhaps we should have expected that," Peko says, and Sakura chuckles, deep in her chest.

"Perhaps so."

It's the most relaxed Peko thinks she has ever been, on one of the system's introductory dinners. She resists the urge to tap the device to check the time, and tucks it into the bottom of her purse instead.

*

Their living quarters are smaller than any of the ones she’s had before. It’s compact, but not sparse or unappealing. She likes it. She appreciates that about the system, if nothing else: it is exactly what it needs to be, for exactly as long as it’s needed.

The fireplace doesn’t ignite automatically. She assumes it’s something to do with seasonality; the temperature controls of the building are state-of-the-art and likely could easily adjust for the additional heat, but it would still be strange, this deep into mid-summer. The shutters on the front windows whirr open instead, and she can see the pulsing glows of fireflies darting through the grass outside.

“Before we go any further,” Sakura says, when she closes the door behind them, “I would like to be clear about something.”

Peko turns to listen.

“I have no intention of consenting to anything physical in the time we’ve been given,” Sakura says. “I apologize if that goes against any expectations you may have had.”

“No,” Peko answers, “I understand.” She looks back out the window. It only takes a moment for another spot of light to wink in and back out. “But… that doesn’t mean the time can’t still be enjoyable.”

Sakura says, “I agree,” and Peko can hear the smile in her voice.

*

They share the bed that night, and sleep back-to-back.

*

Peko finds that their schedules are extremely similar: they wake up at the same time, and have the same regular routine of morning stretches. It’s inconvenient before it’s charming; she’s reminded that their living quarters are smaller than average when it turns out there isn’t room for both of them to stretch at the same time. 

Sakura has her morning workout. Peko goes for her run. When she comes back, the doors and windows have been thrown open to let in the summer air, and there’s a crackling, savory scent billowing out onto the road.

Sakura is making breakfast: pan-seared fish next to bowls of natto rice and miso soup, in heaping portions. They don’t even have a full kitchen, but Sakura has found the ingredients and a small portable stove, and that must have been sufficient. Everything she’s made takes up the entirety of their small coffee table.

“Ah,” Sakura says, when Peko is standing in the doorway. “Good timing.” She cracks a raw egg into each bowl of rice. “Would you like coffee?”

“I would,” Peko answers, taking a seat on the settee. “Black, please. Thank you.”

Sakura pours it for her. Peko has to hold the mug in her lap, to make room for the plates of food on the table, but that’s fine. The warm, rich smell of it fills her chest and smooths through her tired muscles.

“I didn’t realize there were so many options,” she admits. “I suppose I assumed we were limited to what the system had already made available.” 

“The system will provide anything you need,” her device responds. “All you need to do is ask!”

Sakura inclines her head at it. “All the short-term living quarters are sorely lacking when it comes to breakfast supplies,” she says. “I’ve gotten into the habit of requesting them.”

This is her seventh relationship. The number seems high— but at the same time, Peko has no idea how long the average person spends in the system. The only number Hope’s Peak releases is its success rate: 99.8%. Any more than that, so the argument went, and participants would enter the system with too-concrete expectations, and confound the results.

“I’m surprised it’s allowed,” she says, “given how closely the system monitors everything else.”

“The system monitors this, too,” Sakura answers. “The system monitors every choice. Its main goal is efficacy balanced against efficiency, so any choice outside the norm is a valuable data point.”

“That’s right!” her device announces from the mantelpiece. Sakura ignores it, and stirs the ingredients in her rice bowl.

“You don’t seem to have much confidence in it,” Peko observes.

Sakura’s smile twists around her chopsticks. “Then I haven’t explained myself well,” she says, when she’s swallowed her bite. “The system promises compatibility. It’s designed to produce mutually-beneficial partnerships. I have no doubt in its ability to do that.”

“But?”

“‘But’?” Sakura echoes. “That’s all. That’s what the system promises. That’s what it delivers.”

She is giving Peko that same, steady look. Peko doesn’t get the impression she’s being dishonest or evasive, but the conversation still feels complex in a way that’s difficult to quantify. On the surface, it’s a logical perspective, if also a cold one. But Sakura’s look burns too much for that to be all there is. 

Peko finds herself wishing they had more time.

“What do you think?” Sakura asks her, setting her bowl back on the table. “Do you think the system will be able to generate an Ultimate Match for you?”

The question has never been asked before. Not to her, at least. Participation in the system by nature implies confidence in its methods. All of the evidence Hope’s Peak provides comes from testimonials, however: a success rate based on reports of perfect matches, pairing days with enthusiastic couples, previous participants with quotes in the introductory materials. The system works if you let it.

Instead, Peko thinks about here, now; she thinks about the food in front of her and the ease of conversation and just how comfortable the last twelve hours have been. The system predicted that compatibility, not her.

“I do,” she decides.

Sakura nods. “Then there’s nothing to worry about.”

*

The aquatics center on the bottom level of the central hub is a massive facility. It contains a gym and a sauna in addition to the lap pool, and all participants are provided free access while they’re progressing through the system. They go together for their afternoon workouts, and agree to take each other through their respective routines.

It’s as fascinating to see how another person’s perspective overlaps with hers as it is to see how it deviates; Sakura focuses more on strength training while Peko has always leaned into endurance and flexibility, but that still leaves plenty of room for them both to learn and borrow from each other.

Sakura excuses herself for water. When she comes back, she hovers at the edge of Peko’s set, waiting for her to finish. She’s watching, but not focused, critically or otherwise. It’s the first time Peko has seen her uncertain.

“Is there something wrong?” Peko asks, sitting up.

“No,” Sakura answers, and the finality of it seems to calm her uneasiness. “There is… someone I would like you to meet, actually.” She turns her shoulders toward the exit of the gym. “Do you have a moment?”

Peko does, so she follow Sakura out through the facility, down to the indoor lap pool. The air is hot and humid, even with the building’s robust environmental settings; it sticks on Peko’s already-sweaty skin. 

Sakura leads her down to the end of the pool, where a girl has just pulled herself out of the water. “Aoi,” Sakura calls, “are you finished for today?”

The girl is still flushed from her swim, from her chest up to her neck. Dark hair sticks out from beneath a blue swimming cap. She squirts water directly into her mouth from a water bottle.

She lights up with a smile, when she turns her head and finds Sakura’s face. “Yep!” she chirps. “What’s up?”

“There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Sakura says. She steps aside to give Peko room to step forward. “This is my current partner, Peko.”

“Oh! Hi!” the girl says, wiping her mouth with the back of her arm. “I’m Aoi. It’s nice to meet you! I’d shake your hand, but I’m kinda still...” She smiles sheepishly, showing Peko her damp palms.

“That’s alright,” Peko says. “It’s nice to meet you, as well.”

Peko imagines that Aoi should feel like an interloper, but she doesn’t; she is social and friendly, and bulldozes any awkwardness before it can find a foothold. She suggests that they all stop at the restaurant upstairs for dinner together, and bounces on the balls of her feet when Peko accepts. 

“I’m glad you’re here!” Aoi says, on their way out. She swings her towel around her shoulders, and hoists her drawstring bag on her back. “I always said that Sakura needed a training partner.”

“I do have a training partner,” Sakura says behind them, and her voice has a gentle, softened quality to it Peko hasn’t heard before.

“I don’t just mean _me,_ ” Aoi complains. “There’s only so much we can do on our own! I mean _training,_ your kind of training.”

“All training is my kind of training.”

“Me and Sakura are gonna be the ultimate team,” Aoi tells Peko. “Strongest on land and fastest in the water! That’s the goal!” She pounds her fists together. “I mean, with the system we don’t get as much time together as we used to, but that’s not gonna stop us! Right, Sakura?”

Behind them, Sakura laughs, full and rich. “Yes.”

*

Halfway through dinner, Peko realizes that if there is anyone at the table who could be labeled an interloper, it is her, not Aoi.

She doesn’t feel excluded. She feels warm and welcomed, and as the timer counts down she can only be disappointed at the impending end of a newly-budding friendship. But there is an additional layer at the table that she isn’t a part of, will never be a part of, and, perhaps, has never actually experienced for herself.

She twists her fork in her pasta, and wonders if the system has made note of that, too. 

*

They read into the evening, out on the porch swing. The glow from the outside light is almost too dim to see by, but she makes do; it’s comfortable here, where the air is warm and quiet, circulated by a lazy breeze. The fireflies peek in and out, from the grass near their feet down to the line of trees in the distance.

Peko finishes her chapter. She checks her device, and the countdown has dipped below eight hours. “It’s late,” she says. “I should sleep.”

“I’d like to finish this section,” Sakura answers, skimming her finger beneath her next page. “But I’ll join you shortly.”

Peko nods. She sets her place in her book and steps off the swing. She’ll need to close the window shutters but remember to leave the front light on, and—

“Peko.”

She turns in the doorway; Sakura has her chin tilted up to the sky, and the edge of her hand pressed into the spine of her book. It’s a clear, cloudless night, and the stars are like a reflection of the fireflies in the grass, winking in and out.

“This has been time well-spent,” Sakura says. “Thank you.”

“Yes,” Peko answers softly. “I agree.”

*

Peko goes to bed. She hears the front door open and close, in the moments before she falls asleep. The space beside her is empty when she does. 

*

It is still empty, in the morning. 

The blanket is still folded over the edge of the mattress on the opposite side, and the pillow beside her head is still as round and fluffed as it had been the morning before. Peko herself moves very little in her sleep; the neat tuck of the sheets has hardly been disturbed at all.

She sits up. She touches the face of her device, and the time remaining blinks back up at her: two hours, three minutes. 

“Sakura?” she calls.

The couch is empty, too. None of the pillows or cushions have been disturbed. Nothing has been taken from the cabinets, and the sinks in the bathroom are dry.

Everything is pristine— except for the book, Sakura’s book, abandoned on the porch swing outside. There is a pretty bookmark set near the center of the pages: a simple ink print of a rose on a deep red background.

On the back, someone has written: _Some things cannot be calculated._

“Usami,” she says.

The device lights up in her other hand. “Yes, Peko?”

The ink making up the rose is slightly raised; Peko runs her thumb over the ridges of it, and looks out across the grass. If Sakura had wanted to go somewhere undetected, she would not have left evidence behind. If finding her is Peko’s goal, reporting it to the system is the most logical solution.

The device waits for input. The pale purple ring around the center pulses with the rhythm of background noise picked up by the microphone: the breeze on the window shutters, the songs of birds beginning at the start of their days, the whisper of cloth when Peko shifts her weight.

It goes dark when it doesn’t pick up on a voice.

She goes back inside. She sets the device on the mantelpiece, and pours herself a mug of coffee.

END


	7. Peko Pekoyama

He’s late. He knows that even before he gets dumped off at the central hub. His device had beeped at him in the middle of the afternoon and he ignored it, kept ignoring it, until a preset alarm kicked in half an hour before and wouldn’t shut off until he manually dismissed it.

He’s not going to stand someone up. He’s not that kind of guy. It’s just _exhausting,_ the idea of it, having to go back to that same fucking booth and talk about the same fucking shit and go through the same fucking motions until it’s over. A day, a week, a month, a year— it ends the same, no matter what.

So, he’s late.

She’s already at the table waiting. She hasn’t ordered her food, or touched her wine glass. She’s sitting there at an empty table with her hands in her lap, and the twist of shame in his stomach speeds his feet up.

She looks up at him when he gets there, and it’s only then, that close and at that angle, that the recognition hits him. She has high cheekbones, pale hair, and bright, focused eyes. The dim lighting of the restaurant softens out the harshness of her face a little, or maybe that’s just because he knows better now.

The careful neutrality in her expression opens up into surprise. 

“Oh,” she says. “Hello.”

“Hi.” He puts his hand on the back of the booth. “... I know you, don’t I?”

“Yes,” she answers. “We met at Ruruka and Sounosuke’s pairing day, a few months ago. You might not remember, but—”

“Oh, no,” he says, “I remember.” He slices the air with his index finger. Color rises in her cheeks. It brings out her eyes.

“I didn’t get your name, before,” she says. “I wanted to thank you. For…”

“Fuyuhiko,” he tells her. “And don’t mention it.”

She smiles, that little curve that’s almost not a smile. “Peko,” she answers.

His stomach is doing something stupid. He told himself he wouldn’t let himself get dragged down this early in the game.

She holds her hand out. “... Would you like to sit?”

Right. “Right.” He unbuttons the front of his jacket and slides into the booth. “Sorry. Made you wait this whole time and now I’m just standing around like an asshole.”

“It’s alright,” she says. She turns in her seat, opens up her purse, and then she has her device in her palm, held out over the table. She looks back at him expectantly.

Right.

He fishes in his jacket for his, and thumbs through the options: Main, Info, Expiration. It’s just a button. If they both tap their screens at the same time, the system will tell them how long they have.

He looks up at her. She must already be on the right screen, because she’s watching him, one finger poised over her device. She’s still smiling that little not-smile. He tries to put ‘thirty-six hours’ to her face, and his stomach sinks. He tries ‘eight months,’ and feels sick.

Technically, checking the date is a choice. The system doesn’t force it. It’s just that everyone _does_ check. Why would you not want to know if you were about to waste your time?

Impulse grabs him. “What if we didn’t?” he asks.

She frowns. “Didn’t?”

“Didn’t check it. Didn’t know.”

She looks down at her screen. Her finger curls back around the edge of the device.

“Just— Listen, hear me out,” he says. “What’s the point of knowing, anyway? No matter how long it is, you still just end up waiting for it to be over. You’re setting yourself up, every single fucking time.”

“I suppose,” she says dubiously.

“How about this,” he says, “if either of us ever decides we _do_ want to know, we look. No questions asked. But to start out…” He shakes his jacket back open, puts the device away, and shows her his empty hands. “You and me. That’s it.”

Something about that gets her attention. She looks up at him, contemplative.

“If you decide right now you want to know, we’ll look,” he tells her. “But… how about it?” 

She sets the device aside on the table. “Yes,” she says, and her eyes are warm. “Alright.”

He finds himself smiling, too. “Great.”

*

The house has a full kitchen.

It’s a stupid thing to be relieved about, after he just got done trying to make an argument for not checking the expiration, but it at least means they made it past the thirty-six hour mark _and_ the two week mark. He’s okay with that.

(She runs her hand over the wide granite island, and lingers there. Maybe she's relieved, too.)

“You can have the bed,” he calls back to her, when he goes for the extra blanket in the bedroom. It's in the same style, in the same place, like always. “I’ll sleep on the couch for now.”

She looks at him from across the kitchen. She says, “... Why?” like he’s just suggested the dumbest thing she's ever heard.

“Because,” he says. “I’m not gonna force you to share the bed with me on the first night.”

“You wouldn’t be,” she answers. “It’s fine. There’s no reason for you to be uncomfortable when there’s room enough for both of us.”

“It’s not about that!” His ears are hot. He glares at the wall. “It’s- It’s the principle of the thing.”

She stares at him. She steps around the counter, past him, up into the bedroom. He thinks maybe she’s decided to let it go, except then she tears the second, full blanket right off the mattress. 

“Hey!” He twists in place, when she stalks past him again. “What the hell?”

The couch is sectional. She’s able to split it into two roughly-equal pieces; either one is technically long enough for him to sleep on without breaking his knees, but neither is even close to long enough for her, which is why it makes no fucking sense when she bundles herself down onto one.

“Are you serious right now?”

She stares back at him, resolute. She’s not the shrinking, unsure girl from the pairing day. 

“You know what?” He flings his blanket on the opposite couch. “Fine. You’re on.”

1  
DAY

When he wakes up, she’s still asleep. She barely fits on the couch, even with all the pillows thrown off, but she’s still perfectly peaceful. A loose lock of hair curls over her cheek, and flutters with each slow, even breath.

Meanwhile, his back hurts like hell. It’s somehow worse than the last time, like it got used to him sleeping in a real bed for eight months and is lashing out at him now for switching back to couches.

He keeps doing it. He’s not gonna be the one who cracks first.

3  
WEEKS

They get invited to a pairing day.

He doesn’t want to go. It’s irrational and stupid, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to go, and he’s fine with that— until he tells _Peko_ he doesn’t want to go, and her expression briefly crumbles into something crestfallen.

“Of course,” she says, “I understand,” and just like that she’s bounced back up into neutrality, like the downswing never happened. It annoys him in a familiar, prickling way.

“Do _you_ want to go?” he asks her. “I didn’t think you liked them, either.”

“They can be tiring,” she agrees. “Especially when they last the entire day. It’s alright. I understand.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” he says.

“I don’t want to go if it will make you uncomfortable.”

“Dammit, Peko, that’s not what I _asked._ ”

For a second she looks so pained that he thinks he may have pushed too hard. She’s not Rantarou. Her walls aren’t the same. 

“I... think they can be enjoyable,” she admits. “Under the right circumstances, and…” She looks down at her hands. “... with the right person.”

Shit.

She isn’t even wrong. The last pairing day hadn’t been all bad. The food had been good. For a few minutes, the company had been good.

“Alright,” he says. “Okay.”

“Please,” she says, “don’t feel like you need to—”

“ _But,_ ” he says over her, “if it sucks, we’re leaving early. Deal?”

He sticks his hand out between them. She almost smiles, and clasps it back. “Yes.”

*

It’s not bad. The party itself is a classy affair. It’s held on the patio of some hollowed-out mansion down by the river, with colorful fairy lights strung up around the railings. They dress to match, both in black: him with a subtle gray pinstripe and her with sheer silk ruffles on her sleeves. 

It starts in the early evening and goes on into the night. It’s warm, but not sticky; the river keeps tossing rolling breezes their way, enough to always keep things on the edge of comfortable. Summer stars spill out into the sky over the water. There’s drinks, food, music. It’s romantic. As far as fancy dates go, it’s solid.

The only problem is, he can’t seem to keep himself from spending the whole night neck-deep in his own ass.

She’s got more patience than he deserves. She puts up with him the whole time, all his comments and little scoffs and sour mood. She tries to bring him back up. She stays at his elbow, talks with him, keeps the two of them away from the cloying chatter of the main crowd.

She tries the whole night, and it falls apart anyway. Not because of her. Because of him: how he blows up over nothing, how he shouts loud enough for people to turn to look at them, and how he stalks off like a child, shoving his way through the crowd of guests.

She saw someone she recognized. She’d wanted to say hello. That’s it. That’s all.

He hops the railing of the patio to get closer to the riverbank. It’s the only part of the yard that’s mostly devoid of people, and it’s where all the fresh air is coming in. He needs the fucking air.

She finds him, even though she’d have every right to leave his sorry ass behind. She hops the railing, too, effortlessly, even in a little dress like that, and sits down on the bank. Not beside him, but close enough, a few feet away. 

She doesn't say anything. She wraps her arms around her legs and watches the water.

The speakers dim. There’s a stretch of long minutes where there’s no music at all, just the gurgling of the river and a few buzzing crickets. There's no one else out here. Back at the house, someone has picked up a microphone, and the rest of the party has crowded together for the grand finale. 

Peko is here, with him.

“I left early, the last time,” he says. He can’t look at her, but he sees her turn her head in his periphery. “Right after the ceremony, like you said. That’s why you couldn’t find me after.”

“I see,” she says, carefully. She’s confused. Who could fucking blame her?

“My last relationship got all fucked up at that pairing day,” he says. “I’m not- I’m not making an excuse. I’ve been an asshole tonight. I know that. I just— It’s not fair to you, when it’s my shit I’m all hung up on. So… I’m sorry.” He folds his arms over his knees. “That’s it.”

She’s quiet. She’s watching him. “It’s alright,” she decides, and that’s the only way he can think to describe it. A decision: hers, not his.

“Yeah?” he demands anyway, because apparently he can’t fucking stop even after he’s just gotten done apologizing. “How do you figure?”

“You need time,” she says. “The system doesn’t account for recovery. It can take a toll.” She stretches her legs out in the grass. “I understand.”

Whoever it is finishes giving their speech. The house erupts into cheers and applause.

“This could be over tomorrow,” he tells her.

“It could,” she agrees.

“And you’re okay with that? Letting me fuck around for however long trying to get my shit together, while you’re stuck wasting your time?”

“I don’t see it as a waste,” she answers, and it’s soft, but her eyes are steady.

There’s a commotion up on the patio. The crowd is starting to spill out toward the steps. “They’re leaving,” Peko says, rising to her feet. She dusts off the end of her skirt. “Would you like to see them off?”

“I don’t even know their fuckin’ names,” he says, “do you?”

“Chisa and Kyousuke,” she answers, without missing a beat. He looks up at her, and her smile is embarrassed. “... It’s written on most of the decorations.”

“I hate these fucking things.”

She holds her hand out to him. “If you prefer,” she says in that same careful, noncommittal way, “we could leave instead.”

He lets her pull him to his feet.

5  
WEEKS

They keep sleeping on the separate couches. She rolls off of hers every morning like it’s nothing; she does a few stretches, laces up her shoes, and is on her way out the door, all before he’s even managed to get his spine in the right alignment.

“Fuck,” he groans into the pillow, “how do you _do_ that?”

She twists her hair into a high ponytail at the top of her head. “There’s room in the bed, I believe,” she says, “if you’d be more comfortable there.”

He bows over the edge of the couch, and hangs his head down to stretch out the line of his vertebrae. “Fuck off,” he mutters into his knees.

She hovers. “I could show you a stretch,” she says. “It may help.”

He’s fine. He doesn’t need it. 

But she offered, so he lets her.

*

They figure out how to get the system to let them order ingredients, instead of just more of the pre-made meals. He doesn’t think it’s possible, but she insists and keeps insisting until she manages to hit on the right voice command.

They go the full gambit: meat and fish and grains and vegetables. They fill up the kitchen. They order for weeks in advance, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s reckless, potentially pointless, and for once, in the moment, he doesn’t even think about it.

She orders a parade of different cheeses for a casserole recipe she loves, which is how she finds out he’s lactose intolerant. He orders a bottle of a sweet, fruity Merlot, which is how he finds out that she doesn’t like sweetness much.

She does try it, though. She manages three or four sips before her mouth puckers and her nose scrunches, a pinch of delicate disgust. It’s an expression he hasn’t seen on her before. She wears the negative ones even less often than the positive ones.

“Alright, alright,” he says. “Message heard loud and clear. I’ll get something drier next time.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, but she’s smiling when she leans over to put her glass down next to his on the countertop. They’re standing close enough that her sleeve brushes his elbow. The wine has left a faint red stain on her bottom lip.

She’d taste like the sweet plum of the Merlot, if he kissed her. 

She doesn’t like sweetness, she said, but he does. He could sweep the flavor out of her mouth for her. All it would take is for him to shift his weight forward, part his lips, catch her open mouth, and—

“What is it?” she asks.

He clears his throat. He steps back from the counter. “You got ideas for dinner?” he says. “I’m gonna warn you right now, I’m a shitty fucking cook.”

2  
MONTHS

He doesn’t need any more time.

If he knew they had a day left, or a week left, he wouldn’t waste it. He’d kiss her right now, tumble her down into their unused bed, and use every goddamn second to make up the difference for the mess he’s made her sit through.

He doesn’t want to do that, though.

He _wants_ to take her somewhere special. He wants to have the date that pairing day was supposed to be, the two of them together under a smattering of summer starlight, maybe some dancing, maybe to a waltz on the piano. He wants to be able to wake up a month from now with his arm around her waist and take a few extra minutes of their morning, just because.

He decides on, “Let’s go somewhere,” over breakfast, when she’s still damp and shiny from her shower, pale hair turned dark over her shoulders.

She smiles at him. It still makes his stomach do something twisting and stupid.

*

It’s not fancy. There’s no starlight or piano waltz. They hike one of the shallow paths through the woods to see where the first licks of autumn are starting to turn the leaves orange and yellow. They have lunch on a couple of stumps. He asks to hold her hand on the way back, and she says yes.

When they get home, they sit together on the couch (his couch, he thinks, and it rings in his head the same way _his bed_ might), and he opens a bottle of Bordeaux that she likes much better. 

It’s an accident when it happens, maybe. They're sitting close enough that their knees are touching, talking about what other commands for the device Hope's Peak might be keeping on the down-low. She turns away to set her glass down on the coffee table.

Maybe he doesn’t need to have his head at that angle when he says her name. Maybe she doesn’t need to dip her chin like that when she turns back to him. But he does, and she does, and they catch there in the middle. It’s a brush, that’s all it is, but neither of them do anything to turn it into less than that.

He reaches for her with both hands. He frames her face, thumbs behind her ears and fingers tangled in her hair. She inhales just a little, sharply, and when he tugs, she sinks forward. She kisses him like that: no accidents, no pretense. 

There’s not enough room for both of them on the couch, not like this; they slip and fumble trying to find a configuration that’s comfortable, and keep bumping hands and elbows. It’s fine. He doesn’t care. He loses traction once when his knee slides on the slippery fabric of her dress, and the smile that breaks against his mouth is more than worth it. 

He pulls back enough to look down into her face. Her mouth is red. Her eyes are dark. His hand hovers at the high edge of her dress, where the skirt has slid up to the top of her thigh. 

“Do you…” His whole mouth feels dry. He wets his lips, and it barely helps. “Tell me to fuck off if you want, but I was thinking… maybe…”

Behind him, his device chimes. It’s so loud it makes him jump, and she exhales a breathy laugh when he has to make a grab for the armrest behind her.

“No consent preference registered,” it chirps. “Fuyuhiko, do you consent to oral sex as the giving partner?”

Beyond the edge of the couch, he can see that her device has lit up, too, on the end table. They’re always tracking them, he realizes. Reading their intentions— and sharing that data, when it’s relevant.

Peko’s realized it, too. She’s gone scarlet— not just pink, fully red, right up to her hairline. She turns her face down against his shoulder, and the only benefit of that is that she can’t see his face, either.

“Shit,” he says into her hair, and it’s as much laughter as it is disbelief. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“The system requires that all participants submit their consent prior any sexual activity,” his device explains.

“Fuck, alright, yes, okay? _Yes._ ”

It chimes again. “Thank you, Fuyuhiko.”

“I’m sorry,” she says in a small voice. “I didn’t realize—”

“Yeah,” he says. “Next time we gotta remember to do that part first.” She still won’t raise her head. He turns his lips against her temple so that she can feel him smiling. “What I was _gonna_ say, was, uh… Y’know.” He slides his hands up her thighs, beneath her skirt, and hooks his thumbs into the elastic band of her underwear. “That. Basically.”

Her head snaps up from his shoulder. Her eyes are wide.

“I mean,” he hedges, “if that’s okay with you. It really only asked me, I guess, so—”

“Yes,” she whispers. “I- I… yes.”

He sinks to his knees in front of the couch. She lets him skim his hand back under her skirt to help her slide her panties down and off; they’re plain, black cotton, simple and practical. From this angle, he can see how every heavy breath rolls from her belly through her chest and out her throat. 

She’s flushed and beautiful. 

Her device chimes. “No consent preference registered. Peko, do you consent to oral sex as the receiving partner?”

She draws both hands up the inside of her thighs, and lets the hem of her dress catch on her fingers. She murmurs, “Yes,” with her eyes on him, lidded and intense, and it makes him feel like his hair is standing on end.

“Thank you, Peko.”

He leans in.

The angle’s bad, at first. The couch cushions are soft and deep; that’s fine for when he’s trying to sleep, but not so much when she keeps sinking back too far for him to keep pressure where she needs it. Her hand flutters on his shoulder, clenching and releasing. He’s getting a crick in his neck.

“Hey,” he murmurs, and then, “Hey,” again, until her eyes flutter open. “Try- Try scooting up a little.” He spreads his palms wide on the outsides of her thighs. “Closer to the edge, so I can…”

She bites her lip. She’s flushed down to her chest. “But...”

“It’s okay,” he tells her. He scoops his arms around the small of her back in a clumsy hug, the most he can think to do. “I got you, alright? Last thing either of us want is for you to fall on your ass, I swear.”

She nods, unsteady. She lets him draw her down to the edge, and lets him lift her knees over his shoulders. It leaves her sprawled on the couch cushions, dress hiked up around her waist, with her hips pressed close and spread open. 

He brushes his lips against her, not even a kiss, and she inhales, sharp and quick.

“Oh.” She pulls his collar hard against the back of his neck. “That’s… That’s better.”

He laughs against her, so that the sound vibrates on her skin, and her breath stumbles back out. “Yeah?” 

Her hands scrabble for purchase against the back of his head. She’s trying not to press down, and doing a bad job of it. “Yes,” she whispers. “Go- Go, please.”

She’s dead fucking silent, the entire time. She lies there with her head tipped back against the cushions, her throat bobbing with every swallowed sound, and he thinks he’s fucking it up, at first. He starts to pull back, means to ask her what he’s doing wrong and what he could do better, when her fingers twist around his ears to keep him in place, hard enough to hurt.

He switches gears. He turns off the part of his brain that focuses on sound, and focuses instead on the things that make her knees tremble around his ears, or her nails rake back across his scalp. He figures out where her line is, learns to feel when she’s right up on that edge but not letting herself past it.

“Come on,” he growls against her. He sits up on his knees, and smooths his thumbs into the grooves of her hips. “I got you. Come _on._ ”

She shudders. She spills over. She gasps, “Fuyuhiko,” at the ceiling, and it hits him like a stone, right in the gut.

He carries her through it. He tries to. Maybe the best he does for her is make sure she actually _doesn’t_ fall on her ass. He has to come up for air as much as she does when it’s done, when she’s looking at him like that, lips parted and eyes dark, with the fingers of one hand curled around his ear.

“Fuck, I wanna kiss you,” he manages. “Can I kiss you?”

She surges forward, and grabs him by the face with both hands. She kisses him, full-on and messy, even though his mouth must still taste bitter and slick. She wraps her arms around him and drags on his shoulders until he gets the memo to come up off his knees. 

He holds himself over her, both hands on the back of the couch. He has to brace one knee on the cushion between her legs to keep himself upright. “Shit,” he whispers against her mouth. “You’re incredible.”

Her lips move against his, too, only he can’t concentrate on what she’s saying because his blood is roaring in his ears and she just thumbed through the button on the front of his slacks. She fumbles with his belt, finds his zipper, and then she stops. 

He’s dizzy. It’s a struggle to find her face, until he realizes it’s because she’s bent her head forward, against his chest.

“Wh-What?” he pants. “What’s wrong?”

She tilts her chin. He can see the flat edge of her smile. She’s trying not to laugh. “It wants to know… if…”

“Fuck,” he rasps. “Goddammit.” He rearranges his grip on the backrest, and clenches his eyes shut. “I _consent,_ you stupid piece of shit.”

“Thank you, Fuyuhiko,” his device chirps behind him.

The momentum is broken. Her thumb at the top of his zipper feels more awkward now than promising. “Sorry,” he whispers, “I- I should’ve thought this out better. You don’t have to— I mean—”

She turns her face back up to him. Her fingers curl around his cheek. She presses gently, until he tilts his head in the direction she wants, and then her lips are on his again, softer this time, slower. 

Her hands settle on his hips. Her thumbs hook in his waistband, tug until it slides down enough to give her room to work, and his breath catches in his throat.

“Peko,” he gasps against her mouth.

It doesn’t take much, even after all that. The warm curl of her fingers, the touch of her tongue to the roof of his mouth, a few quick twists of her wrist, and that’s it: he’s done. He tries to garble out a warning, but she just presses her free hand against the back of his head to hold him in place while it shudders through him.

They’re a wreck, the both of them, when it’s over: her with her hair a mess and her makeup smudged, hanging off the edge of the couch, and him half-draped on top of her, barely able to keep his balance.

He touches his forehead to hers. She traces the curve of his jaw with her thumb. 

“Bed?” she asks.

He breathes in her smile. “Yeah,” he answers, “fuck this.”

*

It’s the best goddamn sleep he’s had in months.

When he wakes up, it’s abrupt, and dark, and _cold._ He doesn’t know much with his brain operating on empty like that, but he does know that his half of the bed is wider than it’s supposed to be. He reaches for her, paws out into the space, and finds the edge of the blanket again. He drags it back around his shoulders.

He just barely remembers to grumble, “Peko.”

“Go back to sleep,” she murmurs, and there, she’s there, close to his ear. He can’t keep his eyes open long enough to look at her.

“What the fuck,” he slurs into the pillow. “It’s nighttime.”

“It’s morning,” she corrects. “I shouldn’t miss my run.”

He swings his arm blindly sideways, and finds the curve of her shoulder. He grabs, and only gets her sleeve. “Don’t go.”

She presses a kiss to the side of his neck, just behind his ear. She’s smiling. “Go back to sleep.”

Somewhere along the line, he does.

10  
WEEKS

“What do you think about tiny dogs?” he asks her. They’re on the couch together, sharing a blanket, his legs tented over her lap. “The yappy, strung-out looking ones?”

She traces the line of his shin with her thumb. She doesn’t want him to see it, but the corner of her mouth tugs sideways. “I think they’re nice,” she answers.

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fuckin’ crazy,” he tells her. “They’d bite your fingers off as much as look at you.”

She doesn’t rise to his bait, and she doesn’t take back her answer. It’s her turn. “Are there any sports you like?”

“Baseball,” he answers. “Played it for a while. I’m better at watching it, though.”

“I see.” 

“Right, so, if you—”

She squeezes his knee. “I get to ask again.”

“What?” he laughs. “No, you don’t. How come?”

“You asked two.”

“Bullshit I did! ‘Seriously?’ doesn’t count.”

She holds her ground. She lifts her chin at him, and she’s not smiling, but her eyes get narrower underneath like she is.

“Alright,” he says. He leans forward, his elbow on the back of the couch beside her head, and lets his knees fall flat into her lap. “Fine. What’s your second one?”

Her hand finds the side of his face. The tips of her fingers trace the edge of his ear, and it tickles, but he’s determined not to show her any weakness. He sighs, a long, slow exhale, and touches the tip of his tongue to his lips.

Her eyeline drops down.

“Peko,” he says, and it rises back up, painfully slow. He’s won, and she knows it. “What’s your second one?”

(He’s an idiot. He’s underestimated her, like he does every time.)

She curves her thumbnail along his hairline, dips her chin, and asks him in a murmur, “What would you like to do next?”

He loses, right then and there. No chance. He accepts the defeat gracefully, and rolls her over so that _she's_ the one in _his_ lap.

3  
MONTHS

He wakes up with his arm around her waist.

They take a few extra minutes in their morning, just because.

15  
WEEKS

“You’re not paired with her,” Natsumi tells him. “You know that, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It _means_ that just because you dumbasses didn’t check the expiration, it doesn’t mean you don’t still have one.”

“Obviously,” he says. “I know that. We both know that.”

She stares at him over the lid of her smoothie. It gurgles as loudly as she can make it.

“Really?” she asks. “Because it kinda seems like you don’t.”

4  
MONTHS

He counts the days up. Four months, almost exactly. They’ve overshot it by a few, and it turns out he likes that less than if they’d been a few days shy.

He’s done the math. His average is two months. Hers is five. They’re sitting pretty at almost exactly the point their expiration date should be creeping up on them.

He doesn’t say anything to her. It’d defeat the purpose. Just because he let Natsumi get under his skin _again_ doesn’t mean that he should be making Peko anxious about it, too. What they have is working. Letting the system shove its nose between them adds nothing and takes away everything.

Still.

It’s too late for the summer stars, but the autumn ones are just as good. He takes her out by the river, down to the spot where the sprawling, rickety house they used for the pairing day is sitting empty. She lets her arm unwind from his and steps close to the water, her chin tipped up to the sky. Moonlight and starlight spill over her, and gleam silver in her hair.

He taps his device. The hidden speakers in the trees fade in: a slow piano waltz.

She looks up at the sound, and then down to him. He holds his hand out. “Dance with me?”

Her lips turn up into her not-quite smile. Color rises in her cheeks, and brings out her eyes. She reaches her hand out, too, and her fingers curl into his. 

They spin lazily together, there on the riverbank, in the grass and soft soil. It isn’t even a real waltz; it’s way too slow and uncoordinated for that. But his arm fits around her waist, and she’s looking back at him with her eyes soft and open in a way they hardly ever are, and the rest of it doesn’t matter. None of it. The steps, the device, the system, the goddamn fucking _wall._

The song slows down. So do they, swaying steps devolving into swaying shoulders. 

He imagines that tomorrow is their last day. He imagines that this’ll be the last time he sees her like this, touched by silver moonlight like that, looking back at him with her eyes like that. He imagines her at a pairing day with someone else, beautiful in a light spring gown, with her name on all of the decorations, and he kisses her. 

When he pulls back, her eyes are shining. She presses her knuckles into the corners of them. “Wait, wait.” He wraps his hands around the back of her neck, tugs her down until her forehead is pressed against his. “You— Don’t cry. Why are you crying?”

She blinks the tears away. She shakes her head, just a little, just enough for him to feel it. “I love you, too,” she murmurs against his lips. “That’s all.”

22  
WEEKS

He keeps counting. He can’t help himself. Once he knows the number, each morning is another increment. Each new total carves itself into the inside of his skull like tic marks on a prison wall.

*

“Is something wrong?” she asks.

They’re having breakfast, toast and coffee and sliced fruit. She has one hand on his knee below the table. They don’t have anything planned for the afternoon; she’d wanted a quiet day in, just the two of them, and so had he. He wants as many of those as he can get, from however many days there are left.

There are soft frown lines between her eyes, and he needs to be honest. It’s too late now not to be. “We've been together five months,” he tells her. “More than that. Hundred and fifty-seven days, tomorrow.”

She doesn't understand, at first. Her gaze goes soft, at first, like he’s told her good news, because it is. It should be. It’s something they should be proud of. A mark of what they’ve done, and what they could do.

It isn’t, though. Not where the system is concerned. 

She sees it in his face, maybe, or maybe she just knows him well enough now that she understands the implication of his counting. She gets there. Her hand lifts off his knee. 

“You want to check the expiration date,” she realizes.

His stomach twists. “No!” He leans forward, and his elbow jostles the edge of his plate. It sends cutlery to the table with a clatter. “ _No._ Peko, no, that’s not it.”

She’s not listening. Her device is on the table, by her elbow, and it lights up under her touch. She swipes through the menus with quick, deliberate precision: Main, Info, Expiration.

“Peko—”

“We agreed,” she says. “As soon as one of us changes their mind, we look.”

He has this sudden, irrational panic that she’s going to look at it without him. He doesn’t even know if that’s possible, and he grabs her wrist anyway. “Stop it,” he says. “I didn’t change my mind, alright?”

“Will it make you feel better?” she asks him.

He hesitates.

“Then we should look,” she says, and holds her finger over the screen.

“You're not _listening_ to me.”

“Please,” she says through grit teeth. Emotion still manages to tremble its way through. “Whatever time is left, I…” It trembles out into her fingers. She clutches the device to keep hold of it. “I don't want it to go to waste. So if doing this helps you, then…”

“This isn’t gonna fucking _help!_ ”

It’s louder than he means, sharper than he means. He seizes her hands with both of his, and shoves the face of the device down into the table. It makes a sound like splitting plastic, but he knows it won’t break. 

“Maybe it would make me feel better,” he tells her, and forces his volume down. “ _Maybe._ For a second. That’s not what this is about, okay?” He swallows. Breathes. “I don't want to know when it ends.” He can feel her trembling. He drags his thumb over the ridges of her knuckles. “I don't want it to end at _all._ ”

Peko is looking down at their hands. She’s not crying. She’s wearing the same sort of carefully neutral look she had when he was late for dinner the very first night, lonely and quiet, slightly strained at the edges.

“The system makes mistakes,” he says, and now he's trembling, too. “99.8. That’s .2 percent of people who get fucked over. You wanna look at me and tell me this doesn’t feel like a mistake to you?”

She looks at him. She doesn’t say anything.

“Everything happens for a reason,” the device chirps, muffled between their fingers.

*

She kisses him every morning, before her run, while he’s still half-asleep. She brushes her lips wherever she can reach him, between the tangle of blankets: his cheek, his temple, his chin, his wrist. 

He teaches himself to count those, instead.

6  
MONTHS

He’s in the bedroom, fixing his tie in the mirror. She’s in the kitchen, packing their boxed lunch for later. It’s too cold for a picnic now, but the central hub has a cozy little lounge area with some fireplaces and worn-comfortable loveseats. They’re going to the aquarium first, then lunch, then a concert in the evening.

“Yo, Peko,” he calls over his shoulder.

“Yes?”

“When is this thing tonight again? I was thinking if we have some extra time, maybe—”

His device chimes on the vanity in front of him.

It's programmed with maybe four or five distinct sounds. They all get used for different things: notifications and alerts and acknowledgements. They overlap in a lot of places, by categories. There’s only one that’s unique. There’s only one he can recognize without trying to, or needing to, or wanting to.

He looks at it through the mirror, and the letters are backwards, but he knows. He knew before he looked.

END

He thinks: they didn’t even make it to thirty. She’s given him twenty-six sleepy, early-morning kisses since he started counting.

He barely even remembers the one from this morning. He tries. He grips the sharp edge of the vanity until his palms hurt, and tries to remember. She kissed him on the shoulder, he thinks, the outside curve of it. It’d been lazy, a brush. She’d been tired, too. She’d wanted to stay in bed with him, but she hadn’t.

He grabs the device. He turns on his heel, and stops in his tracks.

She’s already in the doorway. Her device hangs from her limp left hand, but it’s still lit up. He can still read the face of it.

END

“Peko—”

She talks over him. “I would like to say something.” Her voice is steel bent to its maximum; her face is a sheet of ice about to shatter.

“The relationship has ended,” their devices say in echoing unison. “Both participants must vacate their living quarters.”

“I want you to know that I have treasured every moment we spent together,” she says, rushed and clumsy. She struggles. It’s not like her at all. “And that I- I will always treasure them. It has been… unlike anything I’ve experienced in my life.” 

“The relationship has ended. Both participants must vacate their living quarters.”

“I know that it’s selfish of me to ask. I know that this will pale in comparison to the connection you will have with the person you are matched with, when you meet them. But I… I hope, if you can, that you’ll remember this, too.” There are tears in her eyes, and she lets them spill over. “I hope that you’ll remember me, too.”

“No,” he rasps.

“Fuyuhiko—”

“How can you still not get it?” Emotion bubbles up his throat, and then his eyes are stinging, too. “How can you stand there and say that kind of shit to me? Like- Like I was going to forget anything. Like I ever could, like I’d ever _want_ to?” He can’t stand it. She talks about herself like she’s a ghost, like she doesn’t matter, and she’s so goddamn _frustrating._ “I don’t _want_ their fucking _match,_ Peko!”

Her device lights up: a red, flashing ring around the face. He can see the reflection of it on her skin. He looks down, and his is blinking, too.

“Failure to vacate is considered a breach of system rules. Failure to comply with the system may result in banishment.” 

He drops it. It hits the floor flat on its face and goes spinning into the wall. He crosses the space between them in two long steps, and reaches for her with both hands.

“I want you,” he tells her. “Only you.” 

She sways into him. She lets out a breath, shaking and damp. Her free hand comes up to curl loosely around his wrist, and the other presses her device into her stomach, where the pretty lace of her blouse swallows up the warning light.

He sees it in her eyes. He swears he does. A spark, like possibility.

“Failure to vacate is considered a breach of system rules. Participants have three minutes to vacate, or security will be called.” 

He watches her let it wink out.

She whispers, “Please.”

He lets go.


	8. Byakuya Togami

3  
MONTHS

The device makes a soft, delicate sound when the expiration is revealed, like bells. It’s been so long since she last heard it that it fits strangely in her ears now. It sounds pleasant. Harmless. This is how the system is designed to function: removing uncertainty, setting expectations, and drawing the path for participants to follow to success.

She stares at the screen until it blinks out on its own.

Across from her, her partner sighs. “Fine,” he says, and tucks the device away. “Let’s get this over with.”

He raises one hand at a passing server. His jacket fits him cleanly, neatly tailored at his shoulder and waist. He has no patience for small talk, and told her so before she sat down. He is efficient, if brusque.

His hair is dusty blond. It’s a few shades darker than Fuyuhiko’s.

The server brings their dinner.

*

The color scheme of their living quarters is different. The walls are forest green instead of burgundy. The sheets on the bed are in deep blues and grays instead of dark yellows and off-whites. The couch is brown instead of black.

Everything else is exactly the same, only emptier, and more foreign for its familiarity. The throw pillows are neatly arranged on the couch. The extra blanket is folded in a wedge at the end of the bed. The fridge and cabinets contain only the starter pack of pre-made meals that come with every new living space.

The fire ignites itself. She steps to the hearth, and watches the flames twist and jump behind the grate.

“We should sleep together at least once,” Byakuya says behind her. When she turns, he’s swiping through the menus of his device. It chimes in his palm. _Consent All._ “We can get it out of the way now, or wait until later. Your choice.”

He’s not unattractive, objectively speaking. He is tall, with a slender build, a strong jawline, and piercing blue eyes. Even still, she isn’t compelled.

He is direct, but he lacks Fuyuhiko’s passion to focus it. He is abrasive, but he lacks Fuyuhiko’s warmth to balance it. The idea of his hands writing over the same paths Fuyuhiko already mapped across her skin makes her stomach churn.

She says, “No.”

He looks at her. His eyes track from her face, to the top of her head, to her feet, and then back up again. She doesn’t feel ogled by it; she feels evaluated.

“It isn’t like it’ll be a waste of your time,” he tells her. “It’s to build a comprehensive profile. It benefits us both.”

She turns back to the fire. “No.”

He exhales a heavy sigh, like she’s an inconvenience at worst, like her answer is a crack in the sidewalk he needs to step over. “Fine,” he says. “There’s three months left.” He steps back into the bedroom, pulling the tie from his collar. “I’m going to bed.”

She lets him have it to himself.

11  
WEEKS

Sometimes, in quiet moments, when he has his head bowed over a book or the device or his dinner, she looks up at the pale spill of his hair, and she forgets.

In those moments, it’s worse to remember.

9  
WEEKS

They eat out, most days. He prefers the quality and specifications of the pre-selected meals, and she doesn’t mind them. They have a regular booth they begin to frequent at one of the central hub’s restaurants, enough that familiar hosts and servers begin to smile when they see her.

They don’t talk often, during dinner. He seems to get impatient when they do; he prefers to eat quickly and in silence, so that they can move on. 

She sits on the outer edge of the booth, so that she can watch the other guests as they’re seated and served. She doesn’t hope that anything will happen. She might hope that nothing does. She watches anyway.

She never sees him.

7  
WEEKS

There is live piano music at the pairing day.

It’s held indoors, away from the cold, in a lovely, sprawling dining room with a diamond chandelier. She and Byakuya split from each other as soon as they arrive; he tells her, “Don’t follow me,” when he drops her elbow, so she doesn’t.

She follows the music instead, to the narrow upright piano in the back of the room. The pianist is a young blonde woman with a heart-shaped face and an easy smile, and Peko recalls her features, if not her name.

She’s playing a lively, upbeat piece that demands the entire breadth of the keys, but her face still opens up with recognition when she finds Peko watching her. She lifts her chin in a way that makes Peko think she’d like her to wait, so she does. The song wraps up in a tinkling flourish through the upper end of the keyboard.

“Hi,” she says, when she’s finished. “It’s Peko, right?”

“Oh,” Peko says. “Yes. I’m sorry, I…”

“Kaede,” she answers, without Peko needing to ask. “It’s okay. You meet so many people here it can be hard to keep track. I just had a leg up, with how much Tenko talks about you.”

“Is Tenko here with you?” Peko asks. “I’d like to say hello to her, as well.”

Kaede flushes. She turns back to the keys. “Oh, um. Sorry, no, we— That ended a while ago.” 

“I’m sorry,” Peko says, “I thought…”

“It’s okay, sometimes I still— It’s okay.”

The conversation wanes awkwardly. Peko doesn’t want to excuse herself, though. The rest of the celebration is crowded and compact, and Byakuya had made himself clear about her accompanying him for the afternoon.

“Hey,” Kaede says. “Why don’t you sit with me? It’d be nice to have some company.”

Peko eyes the bench. It’s a small piano; there’s not much room for error. “I wouldn’t want to distract you,” she says.

“It’s okay. I know this next one by heart. More or less.” Kaede turns the page of her sheet music. “As long as you don’t mind if I space out every now and then.”

“... I don’t mind.”

“Great!” Kaede slides down the bench to make room, and smiles expectantly up at her. Peko sits, perched on the edge so that Kaede can still reach the pedals without additional effort.

She plays. It’s a slow, soulful melody, each note a gentle touch, the progression rising and falling in waves. Kaede sways along with it, eyes shut, hands flowing up and down the keyboard. Couples come together on the square dance floor beyond the piano, arms wound around each other’s waists, fingers intertwined. 

Peko looks down at the glossy finish of the keys.

“Some people say this song is too simplistic,” Kaede murmurs beside her. She still hasn’t opened her eyes, and her focus doesn’t break. “But I think that’s part of what makes it beautiful. There’s so much power in simple things. So much we don’t realize the beauty of right away. But if you really stop, if you really listen…”

She trails off. She follows the melody up, higher, spiraling… and then it finishes, as quietly and gently as it began 

“I think it’s lovely,” Peko says, softly, so she doesn’t disturb the silence too much.

“I’m glad.” Kaede’s smile breaks out over her face again, only smaller this time, more muted. “This’ll probably be the last time I can play for everyone,” she says. “So... I wanted it to be special.”

“The last time?”

Kaede traces the keys with the tips of her fingers. “The system is putting me on a… ‘temporary hiatus’ after today,” she says. “It says it I’ve been distracted. It wants me to put more of my focus on my relationships.” Her hands spread. She falls into the pattern of a silent melody, touch light on the keys. “It might be right. I’ve… felt distracted, for a while.”

“I’ve always appreciated your music,” Peko tells her honestly. “It will be missed.”

“Thanks.” Kaede bows her head, letting her pinky finger press a single key all the way down. It’s a low note at the very end of the board, and it hums, a heavy vibration. “I’ll still be able to play. There’s a piano in the concert hall I can practice with when no one else is using it.” She laughs, a little exhale. “Tenko always made it feel like a concert, when I did that.” The laugh catches, and her mouth turns down. “… But still, it’s not the same. Not really. You know what I mean?”

Peko isn’t sure she does. It’s the performance Kaede will miss, not the playing itself, and Peko has never been a performer. She relates to the sentiment, though, heavy in the center of her chest: the sensation of the system taking away something good to make way for something it deems better.

“The system works if you let it,” she says. “That's what they say.”

Kaede sighs. “That’s what they say,” she echoes. She straightens her spine, and spreads her hands. “Sometimes I wonder.”

She plays.

1  
MONTH

“Have you seen them yet?” Byakuya asks her over dinner. He has a strip steak he’s cutting into. She has a plate of rosemary chicken she hasn’t touched.

It’s one of the few times he’s initiated the conversation before her, or initiated any conversation at all. She pulls her gaze away from the host stand at the front of the restaurant, but he isn’t looking at her; he’s focused on his food.

“I’m sorry?”

“The person you’ve been wasting my time to obsess over,” he clarifies, mild, like a comment on the doneness of his dinner. “Have you seen them yet?”

Her heart stutters against her ribs. When he does finally look up, his eyes are like ice, flat and cold.

“ _Him_ is more likely,” he goes on, while she struggles for a response, “if only because sometimes you think you see him when you look at me. Not as likely to happen if it were a woman.” He doesn’t even pause for her reactions. He lays his silverware down on his plate. “I’d say we share at least one physical trait, maybe two. Definitely not more than that.” 

Her hands curl into fists in her lap.

“What could it be?” he muses. He searches her face in a way that makes her feel like a butterfly behind glass. “Eye color?” He waits, then tries again, “Hair color?” Her stomach plunges, and his lip curls. “Blonds, is it? Funny. You didn’t strike me as the type.”

“Stop,” she says under her breath.

“You’re pathetic,” he tells her, like she didn't say anything at all. “Idiots like you are what’s diluting the pool for the rest of us. What did you expect would happen? The system would throw the doors open for you because you decided to pair yourself?” He leans forward on his elbows. She holds her spine straight in spite of him. “You stumbled into some half-baked compatibility, let your own desperate loneliness run rampant, and now I’m the one having to clean up the mess.”

She doesn’t flinch from his stare, even when the dagger twists in her chest. “Thank you for the offer,” she tells him coolly, when her breath has settled. “But I don’t recall asking for your advice.”

His jaw clenches. His chin lifts, and he doesn’t glare away from her; he glares at her, down the length of his nose.

“Usami,” he says.

His device lights up, a dark teal ring around the edge. “Yes, Byakuya?”

“Cancel our dinner reservations for the rest of the month.” He drops his napkin into his plate, over his unfinished dinner. “I’ll make other arrangements.”

“Understood!”

He stands up from the table, and walks out.

5  
DAYS

She keeps her morning run in her schedule. She doubles the distance, then triples it, then quadruples it, until one morning she runs until she can’t anymore. She runs until her lungs are burning and her knees give out, until she has to collapse at the base of a tree beside the path before she vomits.

“Usami,” she says, when she can.

It buzzes against her arm. “Yes, Peko?”

She swallows. She wants to know how far the walk back to her living quarters is. She wants to know if the system will deliver water to her location. Across the footpath, there is a row of young, budding wildflowers beginning to peek out from beneath the winter chill, and she inhales, slow and rattling. 

“Why couldn’t it have been longer?” she asks.

“I’m sorry,” it answers, “that question is too broad. Being specific helps me understand!”

Her chest hurts. Her throat hurts. She didn't expect it to hurt this much, so many months later. It's like the wound is as fresh as the day it happened. It's like it's happening still, always, constantly, something deep in her chest torn straight from her body.

“My fourth relationship,” she says, and manages to hold it steady, “why was six months chosen as the expiration?”

“Everything happens for a reason,” the device responds.

“Will you tell me the reason?”

It processes the question, the acknowledging light in the center of the face pulsing longer than she’s ever seen it. “I’m sorry!” it decides finally. “That portion of the algorithm is a trade secret. Details could confound the results of the system, and can’t be released to participants.”

She bows her head against her knees. “What can you tell me?”

This answer doesn’t take any time at all: “Everything happens for a reason.”

She closes her eyes. 

She doesn’t ask for water, and finds her way back on her own.

*

The sound the device makes when time expires is like the end of an alarm, petering out, ringing in her head even after it’s gone silent.

Byakuya is already walking away.

END


	9. Celestia Ludenberg

3  
WEEKS

She says, “I see,” like it bores her. He doesn’t say anything; he just puts the device back in his pocket and picks up his fork. If the system wants to go back to bouncing him from relationship to relationship, that’s fine. He couldn’t give a shit if he tried.

He has pork medallions for dinner. He figures they must have had a nice, crisp sear around the edge at one point, until they sat out on the table for twenty minutes and went slick and soggy instead. They’re served in a thick, rich mushroom sauce that’s since cooled and congealed all around them. When he picks the vegetables out, they leave an indentation behind in it.

He was late. She ordered for them both while she was waiting.

“I would never have started _eating_ without you, of course,” she says. She plucks the edges of her napkin and drapes it over her lap. “That would have been extremely rude.”

She has a fresh winter salad, dotted with pomegranate seeds. It has a crisp, fresh crunch when she takes a bite.

He scoops the sauce back over the pork, to at least get some movement back in it, so it looks more like food and less like grime. “If you’re gonna bullshit me,” he tells her, “at least pretend to make an effort.”

Her eyes get narrower when she smiles. They’re almost familiar; the shade of her irises is close enough that it’s uncomfortable, like a needle under his skin. But they narrow at the edges, not at the bottoms, and it makes them look sharper, not softer. They don’t crinkle like Peko’s. They’re not warm like Peko’s. 

The asparagus is slimy, but he eats it anyway.

*

She has this weird, elaborate black fur stole instead of a coat. He has no idea how it’s supposed to keep her warm, except maybe by combining it with all the overstacked layers of her dress. It lies heavily on the back of her neck, and when she slips it off, it leaves her hair messy in the back.

Everything about her is so prim and perfect and carefully aligned. It’s a wrinkle that’s only there for a second, before she reaches back to smooth down the flyaways, but it’s a wrinkle that makes her real in a way she hadn’t been before now. She’s a participant, too. The system stuck her with him as much as it stuck him with her.

There’s a lump in his throat.

“Listen,” he says, “I need to be upfront about something, alright?”

She’s hanging her stole from the rack next to the door. She barely glances at him. “Oh?” she says. “And what is that?”

“This is gonna be a waste of your time.”

Her hand drops. She tilts her head toward him, curious. She doesn’t say anything at first, just looks; the color of her eyes makes him feel sick.

“The idea that anything is truly wasted where the system is concerned is an arguable point,” she answers. “But please, continue.”

“It’s not a story,” he says. She doesn’t get that much. She gets as much information as she’s owed, and that’s it. “I’m hung up on a girl and three weeks isn’t enough time to get over it.” He needs to turn his eyes away from hers, at anything else, and finds himself staring at the door. “That’s it.”

“I see.” She approaches him, step by step, picking her thin gloves off her fingers. “And you felt it was necessary to warn me of this… shall we say, ‘hang up’?”

He shoves his hands in his pockets. Her stare is intense enough that it’s awkward for him not to look her in the face, and he still manages not to. “It’s better than not saying anything, isn’t it?”

“Not everyone would agree with that sentiment,” she says. “But you are a gentleman, yes?”

She’s getting too close. He shuffles back on his heels— and then she reaches for his shoulder. Her grip is harsher than he expects, and when she wrenches him forward, he stumbles into her. He can’t help but look at her then, that split second before she’s too close to see properly, and her eyes are delighted in a way that sends a chill down his spine.

“Tell me,” she murmurs against his ear, “exactly how little self-respect do you think I have?”

He chokes. “Wh-What?”

“What were you afraid would happen in these three weeks, hm?” Her tone is light and pleasant, but her skin is cold. “I would take you to bed,” her fingers curl around the back of his neck, “you would close your eyes,” she tilts her head back, cheek against his, “and you would see only her? Hear only her?” She elongates her spine, until they’re pressed belly-to-belly. “Feel only her?”

He tries to shove her off. Her nails hook into the back of his collar and hang there, unflinching. “Hey,” he grunts, “don’t—”

She doesn’t let up. “Did you worry you would lead me astray?” she coos. “Perhaps give me the wrong impression? Gasp her name instead of mine and break my precious heart?”

“I was _trying_ to do you a fucking courtesy,” he snaps. He angles his hips back, curves his spine concave. Anything to put some goddamn distance between them.

“You needn’t have bothered,” she says, the winding quality of her voice dropping flat. “Your poker face could use work, by the way.”

She presses the flat of her hand against her shoulder, and pushes him away with a little shove. She tosses a hand at the couch when she turns away. “You may sleep there.”

Cold air rushes in to fill the space she left. He straightens the skewed edge of his collar. “Yeah, well,” he says, “fuck you, too.”

She doesn’t answer. She pulls the pins from her hair on her way to the bedroom, and the strands spill across her back in dark, perfect ringlets.

*

Natsumi doesn’t say she told him so, even though she did. She wants to, he can tell she does. She holds it behind her teeth the whole time he’s talking, just barely, but she doesn’t say it. 

To be fair: he doesn’t talk that long. It turns out there’s not much to tell. His relationship ended, like every relationship does, and now he has a new one.

“You’re an idiot,” she decides, when he’s finished, “and your new girlfriend sounds like a bitch.”

He scoffs behind his coffee. “Yeah, great. Thanks for the fuckin’ insight.” She rocks her chair back on two legs and grins when she flips him off. “What about you?”

“What _about_ me? You’re the one with all the drama.”

He tears open another sugar packet with his teeth. It’ll make the coffee too sweet, it came to him already made exactly to his standards, but fuck it. “I’m sick of talking about it. I’m sick of— fucking _thinking_ about it.” He spills it into the cup, the whole thing. “I couldn’t get you to shut up about your relationships before. What gives?”

She cradles her smoothie in both hands. She glares at it, her mouth pursed. “There’s just nothing to say, alright?” she says. “It’s fine. She’s— fine. It’s whatever, you know? They’re all just—” She smacks the cup down on the table. It sloshes purple smoothie up the sides of it. “Just, whatever.”

He takes a slow sip. It’s too sweet. “How much time you got left?” he asks.

Her head is low. She draws a spiral in the condensation on the side of the cup. “Three months,” she says under her breath.

“Don’t fuck it up,” he tells her.

“Shut up,” she snaps. “It’s not like that. It turns out _I’m_ not a dumbass like you.”

“Yeah,” he says, and sits back with his drink, “whatever.”

*

Celeste doesn’t let any of the time go to waste.

She drags him to concerts (but only the orchestra) and shows (but only the ballet). She schedules them for dimly lit dinners every single night, where she’s served lobster tail and foie gras and decadent chocolate cake. She picks his ties and pocket squares for him, so that they complement her dress for the night, and hooks her arm primly through his everywhere they go. 

He lets her. He never refuses to do anything, no matter what it is, not one damn time. She knows why; she has a smug little smile that says so, the one she wears every morning when she tells him their plans for the day. 

That’s fine. Let her be smug if she wants. If it can get him five minutes, a chance to plead his case, a chance for her to accept him, or to reject him, a chance for _anything,_ it’ll be worth every second of Celeste’s derision.

He looks everywhere.

He never sees her.

*

Celeste puts him through the wringer, the last night. They have a wine-tasting in the afternoon, followed by a sprawling multi-course dinner, followed by a night at the opera. It’s fucking miserable, and she loves every second of it.

“You know,” she says when they get back, “I must say, I’m impressed with your dedication. It takes a rare man to be able to fail so spectacularly for so long and still be willing to try again, no matter the odds.”

He takes off his cufflinks first, then his jacket, then his tie. She’s studying him, and he ignores her. 

“Oh,” she says, “I see,” and suddenly she’s at his elbow, too close. “At first I had assumed it was only infatuation, but...” She cups his cheek before he can stop her, and tilts his face toward her. Her fingers are cold. “It is heartbreak, is it not?”

He smacks her hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

She giggles, a delicate thing behind her hand. “My. Such a temper. Did you also treat her so roughly?” Her eyes glitter. “Or did she merely appreciate it more than me?” 

He turns his back on her to hang his coat up. She sinks onto the couch, indulgently, with a little sigh, and crosses her legs at the ankle.

“It is nothing to be ashamed of, you know,” she says. “It is a powerful data point, to fall in love. The system now knows a side of you that you perhaps did not know yourself.” She hums, and when he looks at her, she’s tracing a spiral on the armrest with one dark nail. “I cannot imagine you will have much longer to wait.”

It’s bait. He knows that, and the implication still digs in like a hook in his throat, splitting him open. “What?” he says. “You think it’s going to pair me?”

“It is not so far-fetched, is it? The system knows your needs, and now it knows your wants as well.” She brings her fingers together in front of her chin. “Isn’t that what the ideal partner is all about?”

An ideal partner. A compatible other. An Ultimate Match. It’s bullshit, all of it. Either it’s the biggest fucking con in human history, or he’s one unlucky son of a bitch.

“I don’t give a shit about that,” he says.

“No?” She tilts her head to one side, lips delicately pursed. “A whole realm of possibility— a truly Ultimate Match— and you would dismiss it out of hand?”

“Yeah,” he answers. She waits for him to elaborate, and he doesn’t.

“But how could you possibly?” she presses. “There is so much more to true compatibility than a simple _feeling,_ you must realize this. It is not just a romantic partner you are eschewing. It is a business partner. A social companion. Surely that alone is worth examining?”

“The system gets it wrong,” he tells her, and she only laughs.

“Oh really?” she says. “A 99.8 success rate, and you suppose you are the rare exception? How many other lovesick fools have convinced themselves of that, I wonder.”

“Better that than whatever the fuck this is,” he says. He plucks a throw pillow off the other edge of the couch, and throws it on the floor between them. 

Her laughter swallows itself up. Her grin flips into a frown, and it’s a real, unhappy look, not like her pouty faces with laughing eyes. 

“I see,” she says stiffly. “Then if that is the case, I suppose it begs the obvious question.” She lays her palm against her chest, the tips of her fingers toying with the bow at her throat. “Why did you end up here with me?” 

He doesn’t say anything.

“If you don’t care for the system’s offer, surely you can’t care for its rules, either,” she says. “Why did you not stay with this lady of yours, if she is all you truly need?”

Celeste doesn’t get the story. She doesn’t get to know about the look on Peko’s face, how resignation had crumbled through it, how in those last three minutes she’d gathered all of herself up and locked it away. She doesn’t get to know how that felt, walking away because he had to.

“Ah,” she says anyway, her chin against her knuckles. “How sad.”

He fights with the buttons on his dress shirt. It’s harder than it should be, to get them undone. She sits there in silence and watches him.

“Go away,” he tells her, when he gets it off his shoulders. “I want to sleep.”

She doesn’t argue. She stands up, effortless and smooth even in her tall heels, and steps to the side. He elbows around her to throw the blanket down on the couch and smooth it out. 

Her hand catches on his wrist. “There is only one night left,” she says, her voice pitched low but turned up, like a smile. Her fingers trail up the length of his forearm. “Would you like to come to bed?”

His skin crawls. He jerks his elbow back. “I told you not to fucking touch me.”

She clucks her tongue. “All she’s put you through, and still, this mindless dedication.” Her smile narrows her eyes that same way, at the edges, like she’s a big cat tracking him through the grass. She pats his cheek, but lets him go. “That, if anything, is love, I suppose.”

*

Celeste uses up every last second. She picks a pale lavender tie out for him the next morning, to bring out the embroidered pattern in her skirt.

He wears the red one.

END


	10. Mukuro Ikusaba

Peko decides she will do better.

She is given four hours advance warning of her next relationship. Their introductory dinner is scheduled for 7:30 PM at one of the more modest of the central hub’s restaurants, on the ground floor. She requests a new dress for the occasion, and the system gives her something sleek, simple, and warm, in a textured dark gray. It isn’t quite what she had been envisioning, but she appreciates the style. There’s no reason to ask for any additional options.

They both arrive at the same time, almost to the moment, promptly at 7:30. They shake hands, and make introductions: Mukuro is a quiet woman with dark hair, pale eyes, and a line of freckles across the bridge of her nose. 

She sits. Peko sits. They order, and the server brings their plates: she is given a simple pesto pasta, and Mukuro, a block of plain chilled tofu.

They take out their devices before they eat. Main, Info, Expiration.

The system provides a map, and following it is the only way to understand its destination.

4  
MONTHS

They both run in the mornings. They go the same distance, and keep the same pace; neither of them explicitly asks to share their route, but it makes more sense for them to share than not. After the first few days, they begin to run together, shoulder-to-shoulder, in focused silence.

It’s ordinary, the first few weeks, if quieter than when Tenko was her running partner. They run the same standard seven laps around their sector, warming up, incrementing intensity, and then cooling down. It isn’t particularly strenuous. It isn’t meant to be.

Once, Mukuro picks up her pace on the third lap more so than usual. Peko pushes to pull even with her, and then pushes further on their fourth lap. Mukuro matches her, then passes her.

It isn’t a race, but it toes very close. They sprint through their cooldown lap and skid to a finish at the front door of their living quarters, neck and neck, both still panting for breath. The ends of Mukuro’s bob stick in the sweat on the back of her neck, and she shakes her fingers through it to break up the strands. Peko has to swipe her bangs back from her forehead, where they’ve clung to her skin.

“Not bad,” Mukuro says.

They run a separate cooldown together.

*

Mukuro cleans to neat, precise standards. The system doesn’t always meet those standards in its automatic tidying process, so she comes behind it more frequently than not to finish up.

She hums while she works. After the first few weeks, she begins to sing under her breath. She does it so softly that at first Peko doesn’t realize the sound is coming from her; she checks her device first, and then the small speakers in the mantelpiece.

It’s a slow, melancholy melody— or at least a slow, melancholy piece of one. Peko can’t quite make out the words, not at that volume and from this distance, but it’s a smooth, calming sound. She isn’t sure Mukuro knows she’s doing it.

Abruptly, it stops. Mukuro turns to look over her shoulder, and Peko realizes she’s been watching her since she began wiping down the counters, several long, slow minutes ago.

“You’re staring,” she says, wariness in her tone. “What is it?” 

Peko drops her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She can feel her face warming. “You have a nice voice,” she admits. “That’s all.”

Mukuro is silent. When Peko looks up, she has colored, too. “Oh.” Her voice is quiet. She scrubs at a spot in front of her. “Not really.” She ducks her chin when she wipes water droplets from the basin of the sink. “... But thank you.”

When she starts again, it’s just a fraction louder.

3  
MONTHS

It’s late, the first time they kiss; it's not until after they’ve both gone to bed, when the room is almost too dark to see by. They lie facing each other, blankets pulled up to their chests, but neither of them close their eyes to sleep. It’s a cool spring night. It’s warm and comfortable, when they curl together.

Mukuro has a line of freckles across the bridge of her nose. This close, they’re the only part of her face Peko can focus on. She closes her eyes instead, tightly enough that she can feel how the rest of her face pinches together.

The kiss itself is short-lived and clumsy. The shape of Mukuro’s mouth fits strangely against hers; it’s fuller than she expects, softer, more focused. She doesn’t linger, or smile, or touch the tips of her fingers to Peko’s collarbone.

There are freckles across the bridge of someone’s nose. Even with her eyes closed, Peko can picture them, count them, pick shapes from them like stars.

Her stomach churns. She needs to do better. 

She tries the kiss again, shifting the angle of her chin so that the fit is neater, and setting her palm into the curve of Mukuro’s waist so that their connection is firmer. It isn’t uncomfortable. It isn’t incorrect. It’s sweet, and gentle, and exploratory, but it isn’t— she isn’t—

She opens her eyes. Mukuro’s freckles are the only part of her face Peko can focus on, this close. There’s fewer there than she imagined. They’re smaller, paler. The pattern is different.

Her throat hurts. Her chest hurts. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. She tilts her chin down, and draws her hand back against her chest. “... I’m sorry.”

Mukuro’s expression doesn’t change. She doesn't look confused, or concerned, or hurt. She leans away, her cheek still tilted into the pillow, and the line of her gaze drops to a middle distance just ahead of Peko’s shoulder.

“Usami,” she says.

“Yes, Mukuro?”

“Turn the lights on.”

Both lamps on the bedside tables fade in. They’re calibrated to start with a dim, orange glow, to allow for a gentle adjustment to the brightness. Peko’s eyes still burn anyway, but she doesn’t cover them with her hand or turn them down against the pillow. She watches Mukuro pull herself up to sitting, blanket over her knees.

Mukuro wipes the edge of her mouth with the inside of her wrist. “There’s someone else you’re thinking about,” she says.

It doesn’t sound like a question. There’s no inflection in her voice. Someone might call it ‘emotionless’— and wouldn’t be inaccurate, necessarily. Even still, Peko knows to listen differently.

She sits up, too. She keeps her hands in her lap, even though it would be more comfortable to hug her knees to her chest, and answers, “Yes.”

Mukuro closes her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Peko says again. “It’s unfair of me to project that onto you. I… had thought I’d had enough time for it to pass, but…”

“It’s fine,” Mukuro says. She rolls her shoulders back and breathes in until her chest expands to its maximum, with her eyes still closed. She exhales and says, “I don’t mind.”

Her tone is strange. Peko doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t say so; the conversation feels like something half buried in sand, like an errant brush could either bring it into the open, or vanish it forever. She lets Mukuro finish her breathing, slowly in and slowly out.

When Mukuro looks at her again, there’s a steeliness to her eyes that reminds Peko of the sixth lap of their run, the both of them pushed to their limits. “Close your eyes,” she instructs.

Peko doesn’t. She keeps her eyes on Mukuro’s face, and this time, she vocalizes it: “... I don’t understand.”

“It’s fine.” Mukuro lifts one hand to Peko’s cheek, and hovers there without touching. “You can think about them while you’re with me,” she says. “I don’t mind.”

The pit of Peko’s stomach turns to ice. “... What?”

“I’ve done it before,” Mukuro goes on. “I won’t make any noise. I can perform a familiar action, if it helps you focus.” She nods once, decisively, but her hand is close enough that Peko can feel her fingers trembling. “It’s fine.”

Peko catches her wrist. She turns Mukuro’s hand over until she can clasp it in hers. “No,” she says, as firmly as she can manage.

Mukuro’s expression doesn’t flicker. “I know what it feels like,” she says. “To miss someone like that.” She squeezes Peko’s fingers. “I can do this for you.”

“Would you think about them while you’re with me?” Peko returns.

Mukuro’s brow knits. She frowns, a small turn-down of her lips at the corners. She looks down at their hands, and Peko takes her silence as a no.

“Maybe we could move on,” Peko offers, even though it’s like a molten stake to the chest, even though the words feel heavy and unnatural on her tongue, “together.” 

Mukuro relents, even if she doesn't agree. They lie back down. They curl back together, and they sleep.

*

The days go on. Their routines don’t change: they run together in the morning, and they share the bed at night. Mukuro sometimes sings while she cleans, and Peko sometimes sways to the music.

They keep trying.

10  
WEEKS

He approaches her on one of the rare afternoons that she’s alone.

Mukuro had wanted to spend the day with her sister, but refused when Peko offered to join them; she hadn’t explained why, and Peko hadn’t pressed the issue. They agreed to dinner plans at the central hub later in the evening, and Peko had opted to spend her afternoon in the park, reading.

The automated cart drops him off at the edge of the footpath behind her bench. She doesn’t know him; he’s a tall man with a languid gait and a row of piercings in one ear. She doesn’t pay him any mind— until his focus falls on her.

He doesn’t want anyone to think he’s focused on her, which is what alerts her in the first place. He draws a wide, indirect path to her bench, but it’s not meandering, only circuitous.

“Hi there,” he says, when he reaches her. “Mind if I join you?” 

If she thought he were simply someone looking for a place to sit, she’d be happy to oblige, but she doesn’t, and he isn’t. His manner is too direct for that; he approached her, not the bench. Tension prickles across her skin, and rises goosebumps on the back of her neck.

He reads her face. He smiles, and it’s lopsided and sheepish. “It’ll just be a minute,” he says. “Promise. You won’t even lose your place.”

He seems earnest. It isn’t that he feels threatening, per se, but rather that the cloud of tension he brought with him does. She counts three more security guards in this area of the park since he engaged her in conversation; the closest is a red-headed guard in a black button-down leaning against the elm tree at the base of the hill, watching the lake with his arms crossed.

She holds one hand out over the empty spot beside her.

Relief sags the edges of the man’s face. He dips his head, and slides into the seat. As soon as he does, the security guard beneath the elm pushes himself off the trunk and steps down to the edge of the water.

“Thanks,” the man says, his voice pitched low. “Just a minute, and I’ll get out of your hair.”

He has his head turned away from her. He lounges in the seat, elbows on the backrest, but he isn’t relaxed. His hands are clenched. He grinds his jaw. “You’re Peko,” he says to a loose thread on his sleeve, “and your partner is a woman named Mukuro. Is that right?”

She turns the page of her book, and doesn’t answer.

His voice softens. “... Don’t worry. I’m not trying to freak you out. I just want to know if I’m sitting on the right bench or not.”

She isn’t sure if he is or isn’t. “What do you want?”

“My name’s Rantarou,” he says. “I’ve got a message for Mukuro.” He chances a glance at her. It’s small, but imploring. She doesn’t look back. “Came here to see if you wouldn’t mind passing it along to her.”

“She’s in the central hub today, too,” she points out. “You could have told her directly.”

“It’s complicated,” he says. “That sounds like a cop-out, I know. But, you might’ve noticed—” He rolls his left shoulder like a stretch. There is another security guard on that side, further up the path. “I’ve got a lot of company lately.”

“... What’s the message?”

The security guard posted beneath the tree is staring openly at them, now, but Rantarou doesn’t look away. Peko allows herself to glance back at him; his expression is soft, but firm. 

“I’m ready,” he tells her, “if she still wants to try.”

Mukuro never mentioned their name, the person she was trying to move on from. She never talked about them much at all, after that first night. It’s strange, but he isn’t the type of person Peko would have pictured, with his messy hair and drawling voice.

“I know this puts you in an uncomfortable position,” he says, when she doesn’t answer right away. “It’s your relationship I’m barging into. You’ve got every right to say no.”

“I have a question,” she says.

He studies her. He looks conflicted. “... Sure,” he answers, finally. He leans back in his seat, focusing again on the edge of his sleeve. “You’re entitled to that. But I can’t promise I’ll answer everything you want to know.”

“It’s a simple question,” she tells him. He hesitates, then nods. “Why now?”

It’s not what he was expecting, if he was expecting anything at all. He looks at her, his eyebrows high.

“She didn’t tell me how long it’s been,” she explains, “but it has been a long time. Hasn’t it?”

He exhales a laugh. “Should’ve figured,” he says. “You two are a good fit. My timing could’ve been better, probably. Sorry about that.”

It isn’t a proper answer to her question. She doesn’t say anything, only waits for one. He braces both elbows on his knees and stares down between his feet.

“Lemme ask you a question,” he says eventually. He digs in his pocket, and turns his device up on his knee. The shiny black face gleams up at them. “Have you ever asked Usami what ‘banishment’ means?”

“Expulsion from the community, I assume.”

“You assume,” he presses, “but have you ever asked?”

She hasn’t. Not saying so is answer enough, it seems.

“Listen,” he tells her, “take it from me: if the system is giving you what you need, this isn’t a rabbit hole you should be going down. If you still think it can give you an Ultimate Match, let it do its job. Even if that means kicking me to the curb. It does what it does well, I’m not gonna dispute that.”

“But,” Peko prompts.

He smiles at her. It's thin. “ _But,_ ” he says, “if you think it’s _not_ giving you what you need,” he draws his thumb around the blank face of his device, “if you think maybe there’s something else you want from all this, you should ask what banishment is. Just to give you an idea of what’s at stake, y’know?”

She glances down. Her device is in her purse, tucked away where it won’t get too hot in the afternoon sun. 

“You didn’t answer my question,” she says.

“Right,” he says. He puts the heels of his hands on the bench, and pushes himself up to standing. “‘Why now’?” All of the security guards are watching them now, but Rantarou is the most relaxed he’s been since he arrived. “Honestly? I finally figured out that whatever _is_ at stake…” He smiles again, and for the first time she doesn’t think he’s doing it on purpose. “It’s worth it.”

*

She delivers Rantarou’s message.

She does it after dinner, when they’re both back at their living quarters. She waited only so that she wouldn’t force Mukuro to react in the restaurant, surrounded by so many other people. That’s the only reason.

Mukuro’s reaction isn’t explosive, though— at least not by ordinary standards. Peko can see it, the bomb that drops in the pit of her belly; she can see it in the widening of her eyes and the slackness of her mouth, both subtle but not insignificant.

The only thing Mukuro says is, “He shouldn’t have involved you.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have. The point is moot now. “I believe he wanted to avoid unnecessary scrutiny on you,” Peko tells her.

Mukuro doesn’t take it as reassurance. 

*

Mukuro doesn’t mention it for a week. She seems determined to continue on through their days like normal— but she still pushes herself hard enough on one of their runs that they shave a full half-second off of their best time.

It isn’t Peko’s place to push the issue. Whatever Mukuro’s final decision, the system still matched them together. For now, they’re partners. Peko intends to act like it until Mukuro tells her differently.

One night, Mukuro rolls onto her side to face her. Her eyes are closed, but she’s awake; Peko can tell from the rhythm of her breathing. She doesn’t say anything, but when Peko rolls toward her, too, she doesn’t turn away.

6  
WEEKS

She wakes up, and Mukuro is not in the bed with her. She’s already dressed, alone at the dining table with a still-steaming mug of coffee between her hands. She doesn’t look up when Peko steps down into the main living area.

“I’m leaving,” Mukuro says. 

“Yes,” Peko answers. “I know.”

She crosses to the kitchen; the tile is cold on the soles of her feet. The machine on the counter dispenses a mug of coffee for her too, already calibrated the way she prefers it: a rich dark-roast, black. She holds it under her chin at first, so that the steam rises up into her face.

Mukuro still hasn’t looked at her. She doesn’t even when Peko sits down at the table with her.

“Where will you go?” she asks.

“Over the wall,” Mukuro answers. “We have the survival skills between us. We can make it to the nearest city, wherever that is.”

“You have to make it to the wall first,” Peko points out.

“Security is only armed with non-lethal tasers,” Mukuro says. There is a flatness of her affect that Peko finds both unsettling and familiar. “I could withstand two hits before being compromised. That’s more than enough time to disarm a guard and turn their weapon on the others.” She clutches the edges of her mug. “He won’t need to be involved. All he needs to do is run.”

She has thought this through; the chef’s knife from the block on the kitchen counter is hanging off of her belt. Peko’s heart beats wildly in a way she doesn’t fully understand.

“Please,” she says, because it’s all she can think to say, “be careful.”

Mukuro looks at her. Uncertainty briefly clouds her face, a single moment of shy indecision, and then she leans forward to press her lips to Peko’s. A single quick, chaste kiss, and then she stands up from her chair.

“Good luck,” she says.

She leaves her device on the table when she goes. When she slips beyond the boundary of the outdoor porch light, the early morning darkness swallows her up.

*

Peko doesn’t hear anything either way: whether they were successful or they weren’t, or how Hope’s Peak responded, if at all.

She supposes she wouldn’t.

*

Being in the system without a partner is strange. So much of it is calibrated for couples, from the two-seat automated carts, to the width of the restaurant booths, to the reservation system for the entertainment options. 

Sakura had disappeared only in the last few hours of their relationship, but this time there are still more than five weeks left on the expiration date. When she checks her device, the countdown has not changed. Nothing seems to acknowledge that anything has changed at all.

In the evening on the third day, she decides to ask. “Usami.”

“Yes, Peko?”

“Am I going to be assigned another partner?”

“You will be matched into your next relationship when the time has expired,” it answers. “All expiration dates are carefully calibrated to generate an accurate partner profile, which helps in selecting your Ultimate Match.”

It’s a stock response. She’s heard it before. It seems to either miss or ignore the core of her question. “... But I don’t have a partner now.”

“That’s alright!” it chirps. It doesn’t even take any extra time to process the information. “Unique circumstances provide a valuable opportunity for the system to collect additional data for your partner profile.”

She sets the device aside. The line of questioning is going nowhere.

The most she can do is wait the system out.

*

On the fourth day, she orders fresh ingredients from the system, so that she can start cooking her own meals again. She orders too much, at first; it’s difficult to pinpoint the right ratios for one instead of two.

It takes time, but she finds it.

*

On the tenth, she’s able to slide into the center of the bed to sleep, instead of leaving the opposite side empty.

1  
MONTH

Peko is awake when the device’s display adjusts its counter. She’s sitting up in the bed with it balanced on her knees, watching. Midnight comes and goes; the glow from the screen in the darkness stings her eyes, but she still watches until the numbers and letters finish rearranging themselves.

29  
DAYS

She and Fuyuhiko have been apart now longer than they were together.

She taps the screen with her thumb to dismiss it, and lies back down.

*

She goes to the aquarium the next morning. She’s never been; it had been Fuyuhiko’s idea, that last night they were together, before they knew it was their last night together. She likes animals, but usually just the ones that look like they might be soft to the touch, be it fur or feathers. She’d never thought much about fish. He insisted she’d enjoy it, though, and she’d trusted his judgment, so they’d planned a day of it.

There’s a blue-and-yellow striped fish darting around rocky bits of coral. The interactive plaque at the bottom of the tank calls it an emperor angelfish. It’s a colorful, curious animal, gliding confidently past smaller fish to nibble at algae and peer into crevices. It doesn’t startle when she comes close to the glass, only focuses on her with a single wary, black eye.

It’s cute.

She makes her way slowly through the exhibit. This particular hallway is one single, massive tank, curving up the walls and across the ceiling. There’s so much to see: sharks and stingrays and schools of glittering fish, all weaving around one another in a peaceful ecosystem.

He was right. She does enjoy it.

There isn’t a crowd, necessarily, but the aquarium isn’t empty. People drift around her on their way through the exhibit, mostly couples with their elbows linked, tugging each other forward to point out different fish in the tank. 

In front of her, an octopus flares its tentacles and disappears in a cloud of ink. 

Someone gasps, someone else shouts, and suddenly all the other visitors are rushing forward to try to catch a glimpse. It creates a crowd where there wasn’t one before, all around her, jostling her shoulders and elbows. She falls back a few steps, out into the now-empty space at the center of the exhibit.

“Dammit,” he says beyond her shoulder, “watch where you’re going!”

She turns before she can think not to, like the stem of a plant curving into sunlight, and Fuyuhiko is just there, at the opposite end of the hall. Just here. He turns his head, and finds her at the same moment she finds him. 

He stops where he is, one hand on the guardrail in front of him, his expression slack with shock. The blue glow from the tank clashes strangely with his skin tone, and she hopes that’s what’s left him looking so washed-out, so pale, so tired.

He recovers before she does. He puts both hands in his pockets, glances over his shoulder once, and then he’s crossing the exhibit toward her in quick, jogging steps, like there’s some chance she might vanish back into the crowd.

She couldn’t move if she wanted to— and a part of her does want to, wants to turn her head and pretend she never saw him, wants to close her eyes and make him into a mirage, anything to re-close the wound in her chest that’s just been picked back open again.

But she can’t. His eyes are on hers, bright hazel, flecked with green at the center, and she can’t look away.

He stops short before he reaches her, a step too far outside ordinary personal space. He looks afraid to come any closer; he digs his fists even deeper in his pockets, shoulders hunched, like he wants to be sure they’ll stay there.

She understands the feeling.

“Hi,” he breathes.

“Hello,” she answers softly.

He has more freckles than she remembers. They spread out across his nose and the tops of his cheeks in a different pattern than the one she’s kept in her head. She wonders how much of that is time spent in and out of the sun over the last six months, and how much of it is a simple failure of her own memory.

“I need to talk to you,” he says, soft and urgent. “Please. I- I just— I’ve got some things I need to say. Can we— I mean—” He swallows. “Lunch, or coffee. Five minutes. Whatever you’re willing to give me. That’s- That’s all I’m asking for.”

He bites down on the inside of his cheek. It’s to keep himself from rambling too much, so that she has room to sort through her thoughts. It wasn’t a habit he had when she met him; he’d picked it up at some point when they were together, and she’d only noticed right before the end. 

Her heart is pounding, and she doesn’t know why. 

It’s too unpleasant to be anticipation, and too frenetic to be pain. She thinks about Mukuro and Rantarou, about their race to the wall in the early hours of the morning, about the punishment she still hasn’t asked Usami to define yet, and understands: it’s panic. She’s panicking, and she doesn’t know why.

She doesn’t have time to sort through the feeling. The crowd by the opposite side of the tank has started to disperse, and someone breaks off in their direction.

“You were right,” they call. Fuyuhiko’s shoulders tense. “It wasn't interesting. All that over a cloud.”

The voice is familiar.

“Of course I was right,” Fuyuhiko answers over his shoulder. There’s a gravelly quality to his voice that she knows isn’t genuine annoyance. “The whole damn point is that it’s not there anymore.”

His partner lopes toward them. He raises one hand to greet her, starts to say, “Hi, I don’t know if we’ve—” and then he freezes.

“Hajime,” she realizes.

It’s been more than a year since she saw him last. He’s dressed in the same chocolate-brown blazer he’d kept in their closet next to her evening dresses. Most everything about him is the same, down to his haircut.

He smiles at her, a familiar, wry slant. “Wow,” he says. “Uh, hey. Hi.” He tucks his hand back down behind his back, awkwardly. “It’s been a— really, _really_ long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she answers. “It’s good to see you.”

“Yeah, same to you.”

“Hang on,” Fuyuhiko interrupts. “You- You two know each other?”

There are only so many ways to meet, in the system. There are even fewer ways to become familiar enough to greet each other in public like this. From the look on his face and the color in his cheeks, Fuyuhiko doesn’t need the full explanation.

“Well,” Hajime hedges. “Yeah, but… I mean, it was a while ago, so...”

Fuyuhiko’s expression is doing something strange. She expects a defensive flare of embarrassment masquerading as temper, but he doesn’t flare; he fades. He says, “Oh,” his voice tight, and hunches his shoulders when he glares at the glass of the tank.

He’s upset. She doesn’t know why. She wishes she had the context to fully understand, so that she could comfort him the way that he needs, but it’s been six months, and there’s too much to be told through glances. She wishes she could hold his hand. She’s lost the right to even do that much.

Hajime jostles Fuyuhiko’s elbow with his, and Peko realizes: he can sense his discomfort, too. It would have been strange if he couldn't, in retrospect; Peko had always known him to be kind, and thoughtful, and attentive. It’s such a small, subtle gesture— one that coaxes Fuyuhiko’s hand from his pocket. There’s no fanfare; their arms hang together in shared space, and then their fingers tangle together too, like inertia.

Like that, she understands. The pounding, rattling panic in her chest: she knows where it comes from, now. The system provides a map, and while hers may not be as complete as she expected, there is someone at the end of his, and he deserves the opportunity to meet them. Any attempt on her part to drag him down an errant path is selfishness, and nothing less.

She swallows past the pain in her throat. “It wasn’t my intention to interrupt your day,” she says. “I should let you get back to it.”

Fuyuhiko’s chin snaps toward her. He looks so pale under the glow of the tank. “Wait,” he says, “Peko—”

“It’s alright,” she tells him. She wants to smile, for him, because she understands now, but she can’t. Not when he’s looking at her like that, like he’s in pain, like he’s had a knife driven into his chest and is shocked to find her behind the blade. 

It makes her want to hide her face, if only to spare him from seeing her.

“You don’t have to go,” Hajime says. “If you want—”

“It’s alright,” she says again, and he frowns at her, confused. “I was glad to see you both.” She has to close her eyes when she turns away. “Excuse me.”

Neither of them follow her.

2  
WEEKS

She spends the rest of the remaining time in her living quarters. She leaves only for her runs in the mornings, and to watch the fireflies from the porch swing at night.

*

Summer comes properly. It’s warm, the last day, even so early in the morning; she wears her hair up to keep it off her neck, in a twisted bun on the back of her head. She sits alone on the swing outside their living quarters, and opens her book in her lap. Her device counts down through the final minutes beside her.

END

She still has Sakura’s rose bookmark. It’s made of strong cardstock, but she’s careful with it anyway, tucking it deep between the pages so that the corners aren’t as exposed. She traces her thumb over the raised lines of the print, and watches where the curved top edge of the outer wall cuts across the sky.

“Peko,” her device says from the seat beside her, “any attempt to leave the Hope’s Peak community before your pending discharge date is considered a breach of system rules, and may result in banishment.”

“I’m not going to leave."

“I know!” it answers, still cheerful. “This is just a friendly reminder of system rules, in response to characteristic thought patterns. Security will never take action unless a rule has been violated.”

She turns the bookmark over. _Some things cannot be calculated,_ stares up at her in a firm, steady hand.


	11. Hajime Hinata

The first night of their relationship is the twenty-fourth since his and Peko’s ended. (And it is _ended,_ not _broke up_ — it’s not a fucking break-up if neither of them got a say in it.) He knows because he’s been counting; the tally keeps his head straight, keeps him from letting the system suck him back into its timeline instead of his own. 

The point is: he’s not concentrating the way he should. Celeste made herself easy to hate, but Hajime is just a guy; he’s the exact opposite of intimidating, with a harmless face and a wrinkled collar. He fumbles his ravioli five minutes into dinner, and it splatters messily on the pristine, white tablecloth. The staff swoops in to clean it up, but there’s only so much they can do; they’re not going to interrupt dinner to replace the whole thing. The spot stays there, an ugly mark on an otherwise perfect setting.

It’s stupid, and fantastic, and once Fuyuhiko starts laughing, he can’t stop.

“... It isn’t _that_ funny,” Hajime complains. He dips the corner of his napkin into his water, and dabs at his sleeve. The splatter left a line of misshapen pink spots up the length of his cuff.

“It’s not you,” Fuyuhiko tells him. “It’s this fucking place.” He points his fork at Hajime’s elbow. “Roll ‘em up.”

Hajime stares at him warily. “What?”

“You’re wasting your time like that,” Fuyuhiko says. “Roll up your sleeves. It’ll cover the stain, and it looks better anyway.”

Hajime sticks his arms out in front of him. He clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing; he fumbles with the buttons on the cuffs, and it takes him more than two tries to get an even fold, but he gets there. He’s leaner than he looks, with clear lines of muscle in his forearms. He twists his arms to check the bottoms of his elbows. 

“Cut it out,” Fuyuhiko snaps. “It looks fine.”

Hajime sets his arms back down on the table, delicately, like the whole plate might flip if he doesn’t. “Y’know,” he says, “I don’t think this really counts as a _solution_...”

Fuyuhiko twists his fork in his pasta. “Yeah, yeah,” he drawls. “You’re _welcome._ Asshole.”

Hajime cracks his first smile of the night.

*

Dinner is… nice. It’s a low fucking bar, after putting up with Celeste and her elaborate formal dinners for three weeks straight. But it’s nice. He’ll admit that. They complain about the hub restaurants on the way back, the too-perfect decor and the hands-off staff.

They haven’t checked their expiration date yet. Hajime never asks, so Fuyuhiko doesn’t either; it would be easy to think that Hajime forgot, too caught up in an easy rapport, but Fuyuhiko doesn’t have the patience for that kind of naive bullshit anymore. No one _forgets_ the expiration dates. The system never lets them.

“Listen,” he says, when they make it to the cottage. (It’s a large one designed for longer-term relationships, and he hates that he notices.) “I need to be upfront about something.”

Hajime sits cross-legged on the couch, with a look on his face Fuyuhiko can’t read. It might be because it’s not any of the expressions he was expecting; Hajime doesn’t look unsure, or worried, or confused. He just sighs and says, “Okay.”

It’s not a story. Hajime doesn’t get all the details, but he also doesn’t ask for them; he sits, he listens, and he doesn’t interrupt. Fuyuhiko ends up telling him more than he told Celeste, more than he told Natsumi, even: about the day they met, pitted over finger food, about their deal over the expiration date, about the day it ended. He doesn’t know why. Just something about Hajime’s face, maybe, attentive and unassuming. 

When he’s done, all Hajime has to say is, “I’m sorry.”

“ _You’re_ sorry,” Fuyuhiko repeats.

“Well, yeah.” Hajime digs for his device. He doesn’t wake it, just lets it sit in his palm, blank and useless. “But it does make what I was going to ask you sort of… awkward.”

They haven’t checked the date yet. It would take an idiot not to know why. “You don’t want to check it,” Fuyuhiko says.

Hajime grimaces. He digs his thumbnail into the groove between the screen and the plastic base. “I’m just… sick of it,” he says. “Watching the clock all the time. It’s always either too much or not enough, and you don’t even get a say in which it is.”

“Yeah,” Fuyuhiko answers. “I know what you mean.”

Hajime laughs, humorless, through his nose. “After a story like that, I guess you must, right?” He taps the face of the device with the base of his thumb, and it lights up in his hand. The ring around the edge of the screen is orange. “But— I understand why you’d want to look. Really. It’s okay.”

“Don’t put words in my fucking mouth.”

His head snaps up. “What?”

Fuyuhiko drops beside him on the couch. “Who said I wanted to look?” he says, setting his heels on the coffee table. “I know I sure as shit didn’t.”

“But…”

“I’m a waste of a relationship,” Fuyuhiko tells him. “I don’t get to tell you what to do, or not do, or… whatever. But if you’re trying to get out from under the system, I’m sure as hell not gonna stop you.”

Hajime looks back down at the device in his palm. It’s an oversized watch right now, just displaying the time where the countdown would otherwise be. After a few more seconds, the screen goes dark from inactivity.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Hajime says. “This… _was_ my plan, I guess. So I guess I have to see it through.”

He sounds tired. He _looks_ tired, in a way he didn’t before Fuyuhiko told his story. He wonders how many relationships Hajime has had before him. He wonders how many of those were up-front failures like this one— except all relationships in the system are failures, aren’t they? That’s half the point.

“Paid your way in?” he asks.

Hajime looks at him.

“So did my sister,” Fuyuhiko explains. “She talks about it the same way. Her ‘plan.’”

“Oh.”

Fuyuhiko leans up. He plucks the device straight from Hajime’s fingers and tosses it out onto the coffee table. “The system’s got its own plan,” he says. “I say you try yours for a while. If you decide you wanna go back…” He waggles his left foot. “It’s right there.”

Hajime’s fingers curl back into his palm. His whole face softens when he smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

*

They go everywhere. They cycle through all of the central hub’s restaurants at least twice. They go to all the shows and events that Celeste thought were beneath her: outdoor concerts and sports matches and picnics. There’s a pairing day that’s an absolute fucking nightmare, from start to finish, but Fuyuhiko insists they stay the entire time.

(Hajime never asks why, but he knows. Fuyuhiko is sure he does. He’s always hovering, watching carefully, but he never sits close enough to touch, or offers to share his food. They aren’t together. Not really.)

He thinks he sees her, once, on the way out of one of the central hub’s fancier restaurants while he and Hajime are on their way in. He doesn’t get the chance to see her face; it’s just a familiar gleam of light off of someone’s hair, and it’s over before he knows it’s happening. He breaks back for the entrance anyway, shoves through the entrance doors instead of the exit, and stops at the top of the line, heart in his throat, scanning the crowd.

She’s gone, if she was ever there to begin with.

“Dammit.” People’s eyes swing toward him. A security guard near the door tilts her chin in his direction. He doesn’t care. “God _dammit._ ”

Hajime is behind him. His hand curls around Fuyuhiko’s wrist. “Hey,” he murmurs, as the crowd parts around them. “Let’s go eat. Okay?”

Fuyuhiko shakes him off, and leads the way back inside.

*

Natsumi keeps checking her device. She was doing it when he showed up, she did it while they were waiting for food, and she’s doing it right now, in between bites of her salad: she taps, the face lights up, and she leans over to squint at it.

“I’ll tell you what it says,” he snaps, finally. “It says the same fucking thing it said fifteen minutes ago.”

Her hand jumps away from the screen. She glares at him, red in the face. “Good thing I didn’t ask you then, huh?”

“So, what?” he shoots back. “You’re just gonna watch it? Wait until it’s over and then just move on?”

She grips her fork like the handle of a baseball bat and stabs down. “That’s the plan,” she snarls, volume rising. “Because that’s how it _works._ ” 

Heads are turning in their direction. A blonde girl three tables over cranes her neck to listen, and the guard by the gate surrounding the patio stares at him, meaningful.

He lowers his voice. He can only hope she gets the message, too. “And you’re okay with that,” he says. “You’re okay with the system deciding all of this for you?”

“What?” she hisses between her teeth. The girl trying to eavesdrop looks disappointed. “You think I should be like you? I should just shit on all the work that I’ve put in up till now, and- and sit around pining for some girl I dated for a couple months?”

His chest constricts. It’s a low blow; he knows it, and she knows it. He’s silent for so long that Natsumi goes back to her lunch, and the rest of the patio goes back to their business. 

“The system makes mistakes,” he says finally.

Her salad crunches under her fork. When she laughs, it’s thick. “You’re an idiot,” she says into her bowl, muffled, like it’s not really meant for him. “No, it doesn’t.” 

*

He and Hajime get home late. They’d spent the entire afternoon and evening at yet another goddamn pairing day, set up in one of the sprawling gardens beyond the central hub, around all the newly-blooming spring flowers. There’d been a lattice standing behind the paired couple’s heads during the ceremony; it was covered in creeping ivy, with dots of purple flowers peeking out between the leaves. They were pretty, in a girly, delicate sort of way. She would’ve liked them, if she’d been there.

She wasn’t. It’d been exactly the kind of pairing day the system should’ve invited her to, but it didn’t. There has to be a point where he admits to himself that maybe that isn’t an accident, or chance, or anything other than another calculation.

He unbuttons his jacket, and reaches up to hang it on the hook by the door. The one on the right is his; the one on the left is Hajime’s. They hadn’t picked. It just happened that way, grown out of weeks and months of living together. It’d been the same with Peko: him on the right, her on the left.

He stares at them, and thinks: he might never see her again.

Hajime is tugging his tie from his throat. It leaves his collar sticking up on one side.

“Why do you keep agreeing to this?” Fuyuhiko asks him.

Hajime looks at him sideways, one eyebrow crooked. “What?” he answers blandly. “I’m supposed to need a reason to want to go to a party?”

Fuyuhiko cuffs his shoulder. “Fuck off,” he says. “I’m being serious. What the hell are you getting out of all this?”

“Why do I have to ‘get’ anything out of it?” Hajime returns. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Friends. They _are_ friends. They get along. They would’ve gotten along on the outside too, even, if their paths had ever had a reason to cross. (And that’s part of the point of being here, maybe; they almost definitely wouldn’t have.)

The problem is: Fuyuhiko isn’t a fucking moron. The system doesn’t match for friendship by itself, and despite what they agreed, Hajime still watches him sometimes, when he thinks Fuyuhiko isn’t paying attention. Months he’s been doing this, sleeping alone in the bed while Fuyuhiko bunks on the couch, being ignored and compromising his stupid partner profile, and Fuyuhiko still hasn’t even _seen_ her.

Hajime fidgets. Fuyuhiko realizes he hasn’t said anything yet. “I mean,” Hajime fumbles, “we’re at least that.” A nervous line wrinkles his brow. “... Right?”

The uneven flap of Hajime’s collar is annoying him. Fuyuhiko reaches up to smooth it down, and his fingers brush against the warm, quick beat of Hajime’s pulse. It jumps under his touch. He doesn’t pull his hand away.

Hajime frowns. “Hey,” he says softly, and Fuyuhiko can feel how his breathing is uneven. “Are you okay?”

Fuyuhiko grips the edge of Hajime’s collar between his thumb and his knuckles, and pulls down. 

It’s all teeth and impulse; their mouths clack together, hard enough that he almost slices the inside of his bottom lip open with one of his canines. It’s bad. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. His heart is straining in his chest, and all he can think about is Peko’s smile, the softness of her eyes, her thumb against his chin. He swallows his shame like oil, slimy and unpalatable, and it settles like a cold weight in his gut.

The kiss only lasts a second; Hajime breaks it off with a jerk of his chin. Fuyuhiko tries to rise up on his toes, and Hajime puts both hands on his shoulders to hold him back. 

“C’mon,” he says on a panting half-breath, “don’t- don’t do this.”

“Why not?” Fuyuhiko demands. His pulse is in his skull. He’s breathing hard for no reason. “It’s what the system’s expecting, right? We’ve been together four months and haven’t even kissed once. What kind of fucking data point is that?”

“Everything is a valuable data point!” his device enthuses from his pocket.

“Shut _up,_ you fucking piece of _junk._ ”

“Stop.” Hajime’s hands are on his face now. Fuyuhiko tries to pull him down by his elbows, tries to close the gap again, but Hajime is steadier than he looks. He doesn’t budge. “You don’t want this.”

“Since when does the system give a shit what _I_ want?”

Hajime smiles, but it’s strained, weighed down flat on both ends. “It doesn’t,” he says, “but I do.”

Humiliation burns like the butt of a cigarette, ground into the base of Fuyuhiko’s sternum. He thrashes to untangle himself from Hajime’s grip, and Hajime lets him go.

“Are you okay?” he asks again.

Fuyuhiko empties his pockets on the coffee table. The device treats being dropped like being woken up; it shows the time to him— 22:48— like a stupid, unwieldy, overhyped pocketwatch. It’s not, though. It’s listening, to everything, all the time. 

“Sorry,” he grinds out. “I’m tired. It won’t happen again.”

Hajime lets it go.

*

Natsumi says she’s moved on. She and her girlfriend split up, she gets matched into her next relationship, and everything goes on the same as normal. They have coffee when they can, lunch when they feel like it. She complains about her relationship and hassles him about his.

She seems fine. He knows what _not fine_ looks like on her, all over-the-top enthusiasm and biting insults, and this isn’t that. She chatters at him about the new boyfriend she hates, some twitchy kid with bags under his eyes. The old girlfriend doesn’t get mentioned at all.

The thing is, she’s sure as shit not _normal,_ either. She’s fidgety, like she’s always got somewhere else to be. Today, she’s been bouncing her knee under their table since before their food got here. She ate hers in a few minutes and now she’s watching him eat his.

He puts his fork down on his plate, loud enough that she glares at him. “Alright,” he says. “What the fuck is going on with you?”

“What?”

“Don’t give me that. Do you think I’m an idiot?” He kicks at her shin under the table, and she stops bouncing her leg with a grimace. “Spill.”

She stares at him. She chews on her lip. “Fine,” she says, finally, under her breath. “Fine. I need to tell you something. _But_ ,” she jabs a finger in his face, “you can’t freak out, or be weird about it, or whatever. Understand?”

“Wh—”

“Because it’s weird _enough_ already, I don’t need you being all weird about it, too, and—”

“For fuck’s sake, Natsumi, _what?_ ”

She fidgets. She leans all the way back in her seat, her arms folded over her stomach. “You remember that girl I was dating before?” He nods. Natsumi burrows back further in her chair. “So she might have,” she rolls her eyes high, “been an ex of yours.”

He opens his mouth, and she flaps one hand at him. “And before you ask,” she snaps, “no, it wasn’t _the_ ex, _obviously,_ so don’t get your panties in a bunch. You didn’t even like her, so it’s fine.”

“Who?” She stares at him, level, even as her face gets redder. He doesn’t want to know, wants to leave that door closed, locked, _blocked,_ but process of elimination happens for him: women he’s dated but didn’t like, that had room for Natsumi’s relationship to overlap— 

He gapes at her. “ _Mahiru?_ ”

“Keep your voice down!” she hisses, ducking her head. “These stupid guards have been following me everywhere. If you blow this for us, I’ll never forgive you.”

She’s not wrong. There’s three more guards than normal out on the patio: one at the door, one at the outside gate, and another drinking tea alone at a table on the other side of the section from them. He’d assumed it was because of anybody else out here; he’d assume they were here for _him_ before _her._

He clenches his jaw. “Just tell me what the fuck’s going on, Natsumi.”

“We’re leaving,” she answers. “ _All_ of us. Me and Mahiru, and you and Peko.”

She’s waiting. That’s what it is. She doesn’t have a single ounce of fucking patience in her whole body, and she’s still spent weeks waiting on him. She doesn’t even know how long it’ll be. _He_ doesn’t even know how long it’ll be, and she’s still waiting.

He shifts his gaze enough to look past Natsumi’s shoulder. The guard at the opposite table looks him right in the eye, and doesn’t flinch.

“What happened to ‘the system doesn’t make mistakes’?” he asks her.

She glares down at her cuticles. “It doesn’t,” she says. “I’m not stupid enough to think I can pick better than it can. But...” Her face is still pink. She’s been in the system as long as he has; he’s never seen her like this about anyone. “Perfect’s _boring._ Who says I have to settle for that?”

He picks his fork back up off his plate. “You might be waiting a long time,” he says.

“Shut up,” she answers. “Just hurry up and eat.”

*

He keeps trying. The days keep passing, and he keeps counting.

He never sees her.

*

He’s awake when the time comes. He’s sprawled on the couch with one knee hooked over the armrest and his device held over his head, staring at its clock.

23:59 fades into 00:00.

It’s been 183 days. Six months, plus one. They’ve been apart now longer than they were together.

His device clatters when he drops it back on the coffee table.

*

He and Peko were going to spend their 183rd day at the aquarium. She told him that she’d never been, that she’d never thought about it. He wanted her to see it at least once. He thought she’d like it. 

The fantasy blooms in his head the way it always does: dimly lit and unrealistic. If she’s been counting the days, if she’s been thinking about him the way he thinks about her— maybe the thought’s in her head, too. Maybe she’ll be there. Maybe the crowd will part, and he’ll see her, and she’ll see him, and then it’ll all start again, right where they left off.

It’s a stupid plan. He and Hajime go anyway. 

(Hajime doesn’t ask why; he never asks why, even when Fuyuhiko wishes he would. He smiles, and he agrees, and they go, together.)

There’s some kind of commotion in one of the last few hallways, where the walls and the ceiling are all the same tank. People shriek and squeal and rush for the opposite side of the hall, but when Fuyuhiko leans over to see, whatever it is has already disappeared behind the row of jostling bodies. Hajime breaks away from him to follow the rest of the crowd.

“Don’t bother,” Fuyuhiko tells him. “If there was anything there in the first place, these assholes definitely scared it off.”

“You’re just mad you didn’t see it,” Hajime answers, neck craned towards the back of the tank.

“Shut the fuck up.”

Hajime grins at him when he jogs away. There are stragglers running in from the room attached to the end of the hallway, drawn by the noise even though they can’t possibly know what it’s about. One of them clips his elbow, barely, but enough to flare annoyance in his chest.

“Dammit,” he barks, “watch where you’re going!”

The kid doesn’t even look back. Fuyuhiko snorts, turns his head— and then it unfolds, just like his stupid, unrealistic fantasy. She’s just… there. She’s just here, staring right back at him, in the center of the hall not ten feet away, where the crowd has emptied out. 

(If she’s been counting the days like him, if she’s been thinking about him the way he’s been thinking about her—)

Blood drops straight out of his skull. He has to steady himself on the guardrail in front of him. When she doesn’t disappear the first few times he blinks, his feet take over. He checks for Hajime— still at the tank, peering over someone else’s shoulder— then nearly trips over himself cutting across the hall toward her.

She looks afraid, when he gets close. She looks terrified, her eyes wide and her fingers twisted together. He wants to reach out for her, grab her, hug her, hold her, but he doesn’t want to snap whatever thread is holding her in place. He stops himself, plants his feet, and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets.

“Hi,” he manages.

She takes a single, tiny breath, like she’s having to steel herself. “Hello.”

He has the nonsensical urge to ask her what she thinks about the aquarium. It’s a little weird, a little outside her usual wheelhouse, but he thought maybe she’d like the colors and the shapes— or at the very least, that she might get to see a sea otter.

He’d wanted to be there to see her reaction. He’s missed his chance, maybe. The dim glow of the tank spills over her, catches in the strands of her hair, makes her look light and ethereal, like she’s underwater, too, and he chokes on everything he wants to say.

“I need to talk to you,” falls out of his mouth, finally, desperate and inelegant. “Please. I- I just— I’ve got some things I need to say. Can we— I mean—” She’s still looking at him like she’s terrified of him. His throat hurts. He swallows it down. “Lunch, or coffee. Five minutes. Whatever you’re willing to give me. That’s- That’s all I’m asking for.”

That’s it. He has to stop. He’s talked too much already, and she already looks overwhelmed; her eyes are fixed on his face, but it doesn’t feel like she’s really _seeing_ him. She takes another tiny, steadying breath. 

People are starting to lose interest in the tank. They filter around the two of them like they’re rocks in a stream. “You were right,” Hajime calls behind him. “It wasn't interesting. All that over a cloud.”

Her eyes snap up to the sound. 

“Of course I was right,” Fuyuhiko barks over his shoulder. “The whole damn point is that it’s not there anymore.”

Hajime is at his elbow, now. He sticks his hand out politely for Peko to take. He says, “Hi, I don’t know if we’ve—” and then he stops. He freezes. Fuyuhiko looks up into his face and realizes: he _recognizes_ her.

Her expression cracks, finally, into surprise. “Hajime.”

“Wow. Uh, hey. Hi.” He pulls his hand back, too slow to not be awkward, and tucks it into the small of his back. His eyes flicker down to Fuyuhiko, just for a second, and then back up to her. “It’s been a— really, _really_ long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she answers. “It’s good to see you.”

“Yeah, same to you.”

His head is spinning. He feels like the butt of a bad fucking joke. “Hang on,” he blurts. “You- You two know each other?”

“Well...” Hajime’s realized it, too. He clears his throat, and his eyes jump away. “Yeah, but… I mean, it was a while ago, so...”

Hope’s Peak claims that the system runs on a top secret, carefully calibrated algorithm; it matches people based on a malleable base plan that learns as it goes, instead of just rolling dice. He believes it now. This is the kind of shit that can’t be random, that has to be planned, specifically to make people miserable. All this time he’s spent running in circles, and the system had him one degree of separation away.

He manages, “Oh,” and grits his teeth to keep in the rest.

The silence is awkward. He feels Hajime sway into his space, and then knock their elbows together. It tugs on the thread of the knot in his skull until it unravels; he pulls one hand out of his pocket to rub at his temple, and Hajime’s hand curls around the wrist of the other, a familiar grounding point. He doesn’t even think about it. 

“It wasn’t my intention to interrupt your day,” Peko says, abrupt, and his heart jumps, panics, clatters against his ribs. No, no, no— “I should let you get back to it.”

“Wait,” he tries, “Peko—”

“It’s alright,” she says. She turns her face away. It’s as clear a dismissal as anything could be. 

“You don’t have to go,” Hajime says. “If you want—”

“It’s alright,” she says again. “I was glad to see you both.” Her chin drops down. “Excuse me.”

And that’s it. She walks away. He doesn’t move, and neither does Hajime; he watches her until the crowd starts to cut between them, and until the end of the hall swallows her up. Everyone here is a couple, hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm, talking and laughing so loudly that their combined voices rattle in his skull, but when Peko leaves, she leaves alone. 

*

“I want to check it,” he says, on the ride back to the cottage.

Hajime looks at him. He’s feeling guilty, which is stupid, because there’s nothing for him to be guilty about. “Fuyuhiko—”

“I’m not mad,” he snaps, and it sounds unconvincing, even to himself. “I just— I need to know.”

The cart rocks around a sharp left turn; the automatic brakes squeal softly at the height of it. Hajime sits up to dig in his pocket, and turns his device up on his knee. Main, Info, Expiration. 

They tap once, at the same time.

29  
DAYS

The system works, if you let it. That’s what people say.

2  
WEEKS

The next time he’s supposed to see Natsumi, she’s twenty minutes late. His coffee is already cold and he’s already strung out with anxiety by the time she drops onto the bench beside him.

“What the hell?” he demands. “You can’t just fuck off like that, I—” 

She doesn’t say anything. She holds her device out on her knee between them, face-up in her palm. Where there should be a clock or a timer, it instead reads:

PAIRED

It takes him longer than it should to understand. It’s just that he’s never known anyone the system actually managed to match up. The over-enthusiastic assholes at the pairing days he’s been to have all been strangers, and he’s not familiar enough with any of his exes to know if they’d been shipped off already or not.

(Except Peko. He knows exactly where she stands, and where she doesn’t.) 

“When is it?” he asks.

“Tomorrow.” She taps the face to dismiss the message. He gets it. He doesn’t like looking at it, either. “Usami calls it ‘extra’ time,” she says, her lip curling. “‘Closure’ is supposed to be a new _feature._ ”

“Then what the fuck are you doing here?” 

She looks at him, her lips pursed. Ask a stupid question.

“What, you think you’re drowning in options?” he snaps. “You can’t wait on me anymore. _Go._ ”

She stares, and keeps staring. He feels picked apart. “You saw her, didn’t you?” she asks. He rubs at his eyes. “What did she say to you?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“Bullshit she didn’t. She—”

“For fuck’s sake, Natsumi, it doesn’t _matter._ ” He grabs the device from her hand, and holds it up to her face. _PAIRED._ “Is this what you want?”

She looks at it, the line of her mouth trembling. There’s an unsteady, fragile silence. It’s the first time the word _fragile_ has ever crossed his mind in the same space as her. 

She says, “No,” and her voice is small, but strong.

He drops it back into her hands. “Then you have to go,” he says. “If you don’t, I’ll never fucking forgive you.”

She hugs him before she leaves, both arms tight around his shoulders.

10  
DAYS

He doesn’t plan it. It just— happens. That’s a pathetic excuse, but there’s no better way to describe it. He’s tired, but can’t sleep; the ridges of the couch cushions dig into his spine at worse angles than normal. So he gets up. His feet carry him, and he ends up in the doorway of the bedroom in the middle of the night, his device hanging from his fingertips.

He doesn’t plan it. Hajime sits up, enough that the blanket slides off his shoulders, and he doesn’t wear a shirt to sleep. “Fuyuhiko?” 

“Hey,” he says. He doesn’t mean to keep his voice low, but it happens anyway. “Look, can I… Is it okay if I sleep in here?”

Hajime’s hair is mussed from the pillow. He blinks rapidly, like he’s trying to focus. Tension coils in the silence; Fuyuhiko’s heart pounds against his ribcage, and maybe that should have been the first sign to walk away. 

Instead, he presses. “Well?”

“Uh, yeah,” Hajime says, and slides to one side. “Yeah. If you want.”

Fuyuhiko climbs into the bed. The blankets are already warm from Hajime’s body heat, and the pillows are already dented. “Sorry,” Hajime mutters, leaning over to fluff them. “I ditched most of the extra pillows. If- If you want them, we can— um, I can get them.”

Fuyuhiko hasn’t leaned back to give him extra space. When Hajime looks at him, they’re almost too close to see each other properly. This time, Hajime doesn’t pull away. He chews on his bottom lip.

They both know why Fuyuhiko came in here. They both know why Hajime said yes. When they kiss, it’s not because of— mutual gravity, or inevitability, or any of the stupid romantic notions people come up with when the system invites them in. It’s because they’re both miserable and small, stuck at the end of a relationship going nowhere. That’s it.

It’s short, simple, and dry, but Fuyuhiko’s ears still ring. Hajime pulls away from the kiss, but stays where he is. Fuyuhiko goes cross-eyed trying to look at him.

“Are you sure?” Hajime whispers.

“No,” Fuyuhiko tells him honestly. His voice scratches the sides of his throat. “But if that’s okay with you, then…”

He looks down. The face of the device looks smooth and pitch-black in the darkness. He taps the screen to wake it, and watches himself select through menus: Main, Activity, Consent.

It chimes, and Hajime breathes out, slow and shaky. He fumbles for his own device on the opposite table. He swipes across it without looking, and it chimes, too. 

_Consent All._

Hajime reaches out with one hand, but only halfway. “Is this okay?” he asks again.

Fuyuhiko sucks in his breath, and nods.

Hajime doesn’t grab him. He’s not rough, the way Fuyuhiko was with him, months ago. Hajime holds him with fluttering, unsure hands, one at his cheek and the other at his hip. He turns that one, curious peck into a second, real kiss.

The hesitant touch turns into something pulling and grasping. Fuyuhiko’s shirt lands somewhere off the opposite side of the bed. Hajime ends up between his knees with his hands braced on either side of Fuyuhiko’s hips, his hair messy and his face red.

“Is this okay?” Hajime keeps asking. Fuyuhiko keeps nodding.

Hajime kisses his neck, beneath his jaw. Then the front of his throat, over his windpipe. Then his collarbone, then the center of his chest, then lower. He’s drawing a line to an obvious destination, and each touch of his lips sears against Fuyuhiko’s skin. Each one burns like a jolt— not pleasantly: painfully.

Fuyuhiko’s heart is beating too fast. He can feel it throbbing in his ears and his chest and his stomach, all at the same time. Hajime’s thumbs slide beneath the waistband of his boxers, and anxiety and arousal spiral together in a murky, noxious mess.

He thinks about her. He thinks about her fluttering kisses over his belly button, the weight of her on his pelvis, her hitching breath, her spent smile, and _god,_ for the first time he wishes he could just _forget._

He clenches his eyes shut, but it’s already too late. (She’s already in his head, voice catching on tears.) He doesn’t want to forget her. He can’t. He won’t. It’s just that it still _hurts,_ so fucking much, and it feels like every time he finds a door it slams itself right back in his face.

“Hey.”

The weight on his stomach lifts. He tries to look, and Hajime is on his elbows, frowning up at him. “Hey,” he whispers again, breath uneven. “Are you sure you—”

Fuyuhiko’s device lights up on the bedside table, and the outer ring around the screen flashes red. “Anomaly detected,” it announces. “Review protocol activated. Fuyuhiko, do you consent to oral sex as the receiving partner?”

He groans, hands over his face. “Goddammit, why does it _word_ it like that…”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that! Please wait a second and try again!”

He enunciates through his fingers: “Fuck. You.”

It processes. “No valid response registered,” it decides. “Consent is revoked until emotional state has stabilized. Fuyuhiko, you can reactivate consent either verbally or via the menu under ‘Activity.’”

“Fuck, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me…”

On the opposite table, Hajime’s device lights up, too: the same flickering red warning. “Hajime, consent for this activity has been revoked. Stop all sexual conta—”

“Yeah,” Hajime says loudly, “I _got_ it.”

The room goes silent. It’s just them, breathing too hard in the darkness, and the bed, creaking under their weight when they untangle from each other. Hajime sits back on his heels at the center of the bed. Fuyuhiko draws himself up against the headboard and grinds his thumbs into his eyes.

He should apologize. He’s the fucking asshole, here. Worse, even, because he knows better, or should know better. 

In the end, the best he can do is pick his shirt up off the floor, and go back out to the couch.

1  
WEEK

He goes to his and Natsumi’s regular meeting place one more time, just to be sure. He wants to be there, in case something went wrong or she couldn’t go through with it, or— anything. It doesn’t end up mattering. She doesn’t show.

She’s always been tougher than him.

1  
DAY

On the last morning, Hajime comes out to sit next to him on the porch swing. At worst, the past few days have been kind of awkward; they duck around each other in the bathroom and change in separate rooms, but the atmosphere isn’t painful, the way it’d been with Rantarou. They’re friends. For Hajime, at least, that apparently doesn’t count for nothing, even though Fuyuhiko couldn’t deserve it any less.

“So you know that story you told me,” Hajime says, after a minute or two, “about the first time you and Peko met?” 

Fuyuhiko looks up, but Hajime isn’t looking back at him. He’s staring out into the woods around the cottage; the trees sag in the heat, even this early in the morning. 

“I, uh.” Hajime clears his throat. “I didn’t mention this before, but I’m pretty sure I was there. That day.”

Fuyuhiko clenches his eyes shut. Of course Hajime was there. Peko’s partner, the person her second plate was for, the person Fuyuhiko has been telling himself it was okay to one-up, of _course._

Hajime doesn’t sound upset, though. He just goes on talking. “I remember she brought back all this food, and the plates were— _exactly_ the same. She had one for each of us, and she’d balanced both of them, just, perfectly, you know? The only difference was this one little appetizer thing, barely even a single bite. I don’t remember what it was, but…”

“Persimmon,” Fuyuhiko fills in under his breath.

Hajime smiles at him. “Yeah. And she never… I mean, she didn’t usually _ask_ for things. I always had to guess what she wanted, or pull it out of her, or otherwise she’d just go along with whatever I decided. But— she asked for that. It was one time when I knew she really wanted something.”

His chest aches. It’s not pleasant or unpleasant, it just— hurts. “Why are you telling me this?”

The timers on their devices start to beep in sync. Less than a minute left. Hajime looks down, and covers his device with his palm to muffle the sound.

“I’m just saying, this place, it… gets to you. The system’s got its plan. Right?” 

“Yeah, and I had mine, and it’s done. It’s over.” Fuyuhiko wipes his hands on his knees when he stands up from the swing. He pulls his device out of his pocket, and the sound gets clearer. “Time to move on.”

“Is that what you want?” Hajime asks him. “To move on?”

Fuyuhiko doesn’t answer. His answer doesn’t matter anymore; the system doesn’t give a shit what he wants. He watches the timer instead: three, two, one.

END


	12. Kaito Momota

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, folks! First, I want to take a moment to thank everybody for reading and commenting on this fic -- I've seen everything you've written, and I really appreciate it! Second, I want to apologize for the gap in posting; we're just about hitting end game here, and I hope you'll stick with me for the ending!

2  
MONTHS

“Hey,” he says, not fifteen minutes into dinner, “let’s get out of here.”

She looks at their plates; he’s only halfway through his steak burger, and she’s only just started on her polenta. It’s possible he doesn’t like his meal, but the system’s choices balance all kinds of different variables: taste, mood, ambience, time of day, meal history. She’s never had a pre-selected meal she didn’t enjoy. She’s never met anyone who has.

“... Are you finished?” she asks.

“What? No way! This is way too good to leave behind.” He takes another bite, and keeps talking without covering his mouth. “We can take it to go!”

She says, “Can we?” but he’s already flung his arm out into the aisle.

His name is Kaito. He’s a tall, boisterous man with a charismatic smile and a booming voice. Since she sat down, he’s been talking to her like he’s known her for months, not minutes. It only takes a moment for him to get the attention of a server.

As it happens: they can. The server takes her plate, and returns with a sturdy plastic container, the transparent lid misty with condensation. It comes with high-quality disposable silverware and a quilted paper napkin, tied with a bow. (Hers is black; his is purple.)

He’s on his feet already. He walks with a high chin and a long, confident stride; he doesn’t even check over his shoulder to see if she’s following. She considers staying where she is and letting him wander as he pleases, but that would leave her alone in the system’s restaurant, with its dim lighting and vaulted ceilings and perfect table settings.

She stands up.

*

She assumed they’d be going back to their assigned living quarters, but Kaito leads her out of the hub and beyond the departure dock. He doesn’t even follow a path; he simply vaults himself over the low barrier marking the cart path, and strides off through the grass.

Peko is three steps behind. They walk in silence for long minutes, until the lights from the central hub behind them begin to recede.

“Where are we going?” she asks, when no destination presents itself.

“I wanna show you something,” he answers, without looking back at her. “Don’t worry. It’s not far, promise.”

She keeps following. When he decides to stop, it’s abrupt, right in the middle of the field. She can’t tell what the difference is between this spot and any other in the last ten minutes.

“Stars,” he announces, with his hands on his hips and his chin turned up to the sky. “Nothing like ‘em, don’t you think?”

She looks up. He isn’t wrong, necessarily: there are so many stars out right now, more than she’s ever seen at once, all of them winking down at her. The light pollution from the central hub must not be bright enough to wash them out. It’s like someone stretched a dark blanket out over a lamp, and pulled some of the fibers too far.

He flops down in the grass, feet sprawled out in front of him, and cracks open his container of leftovers. She kneels beside him, ankles tucked beneath her. 

“... Is this all?” she asks.

“All?” he repeats, indignant. He points his plastic knife at her. “Whaddaya mean _all?_ This is a real marvel of the universe, and we’ve got front row seats!”

“They’re lovely,” she agrees, “but why did we need to see them today?”

He shrugs, and takes a large bite of the remaining half of his burger. “Something’s up with you,” he tells her, with his mouth still full. “Didn’t seem like you wanted to be in there. So I brought us out here.”

She looks back up; they’re summer stars, thrown across the sky in glittering constellations. 

She peels open the lid of her own container, and they finish their meal together.

5  
WEEKS

It’s strange, sharing living space with someone again. There’s no reason for it to be— the situation with Mukuro was an aberration, if anything— but it takes adjustment all the same. Kaito has a tendency to sprawl in his sleep, and Peko had grown accustomed to having most of the bed to herself. He insists on running with her in the mornings, and his form leaves something to be desired; he likes to sprint, and often wears himself out before they’re even halfway finished.

“This is intended to be a warm up,” Peko tells him, the fourth time it happens. She jogs in place while he doubles over, gasping for breath. “It’s not necessary to push yourself this hard.”

“Yeah!” he gasps. “No, I know! Just- Just gettin’ warmed up.” He claps his hands, and straightens his shoulders with a shout. “Alright! I’m ready! Let’s do this!”

“If you’d rather go back, I can—”

He makes a noise deep in his throat, somewhere between a growl and a groan, and takes off down the path on unsteady legs.

The most she can do is stay on path.

32  
DAYS

They go for walks in the evenings. He draws constellations in the sky for her, and points out the gleaming colored specks of distant planets. He enjoys talking, and she enjoys listening; he is unselfconsciously enthusiastic, and delves into every question she asks with as much fervor as the last.

(His dream is to be an astronaut one day, he tells her.)

She doesn’t always understand all the particulars he lays out for her, but their walks are nice all the same. The summer starlight is quietly beautiful, and nights in the system are always clear and comfortable. It’s romantic, she’s decided: warm air and gleaming stars and intimate conversation. It makes her chest ache in a way that could only be nerves; it’s a gentle pull, bittersweet but enticing, like a crooked finger behind her sternum drawing her forward into— something. She isn’t sure yet what.

He stops short. “Hang on,” he says, “come back to—” He sets both hands on her shoulders and draws her back a step. “Yeah, right here.” 

He has his chin hooked over her left shoulder, by her cheek. She can feel and hear his smile when he says, “Look straight up. See that? Little cloud-type thing, right...” He points over her right shoulder. “... there.”

She does. There’s a hazy patch of color hanging in the sky above them, faint but unmistakable now that he’s pointed it out. It looks like swirled dust, or diffused light. She’d never noticed it before now.

“It’s beautiful,” she murmurs.

“That’s the universe for ya,” he says. “Always more to see.” He pats her shoulders once and then lets her go, stepping around and past her. When he catches her eye, he smiles, broad and plain, without reservation. 

The pull in her chest tightens, like urgency.

“Will you kiss me?” she asks.

His brow lifts; he seems caught off-guard. She may have read the moment incorrectly. “What,” he says, “right now?”

Her face warms. She looks at her feet. “If you’d rather not,” she says, hastily enough that it makes her face even warmer, “I understand.”

“No— I mean. I want to.” He takes a sliding step back towards her. This time, his hands settle into the dip of her waist. “Just wasn’t expecting it like that.”

His grip is gentle, but firm. The placement of his hands feel strange, almost, like they’re the wrong shape, in the wrong place, but all it takes is a slight shift of her weight to get him to resettle them, and it’s— better. When she looks up into his face, he’s smiling at her, calm and confident. She feels warm. She could be comfortable, like this.

She cups the side of his neck. He bows his head. 

His facial hair scratches at her cheek when they kiss, and it’s an unfamiliar sensation, if not an altogether pleasant or unpleasant one. It’s new, perhaps distracting. She’s sure the system will consider it a valuable data point, though she can’t say she’d agree.

“How’s that?” he asks her, close enough that his lips still track with hers. 

The night is warm, his eyes are dark, and his chin still tickles her face, this close. One of his palms has slid to the small of her back and cupped there, steady. The stars are bright, he’s holding her, and it’s— fine.

Her nerves haven’t settled, though; the fond, bittersweet ache has skewed into something off-kilter, like a too-similar puzzle piece forced into the wrong place. Her heart pounds uncomfortably. It feels like she’s forgotten something, without knowing what.

(She misses him. It’s normal. It’s natural. There’s nothing that Kaito has done wrong. All it needs is time to pass.

Except: she’s missed him for months, and never once has it felt like this, like a thread unravelling at the base of her skull.)

She closes her eyes. She curls her fingers around the nape of Kaito’s neck, and tries again.

25  
DAYS

His hands always feel strange on her skin. Even the tips of his fingers, tickling her belly when he helps pull her nightshirt over her head; or the flat of his hand, dragging against her ribs when he reaches around her to unhook the clasp of her bra; or the wide set of his palms, hooking gently beneath her knees to press her legs back to her chest.

It’s not the first time they’ve tried. The first time was clumsy and spur-of-the-moment, and ended uncomfortably. From there they tried to plan, scrolled through the _Consent Specific_ options together, with mixed results.

This time, she tries to focus only on the physical sensations: his hips flush with hers, his lips against her neck, the warmth of his body heat. She tries, but it still feels wispy and disconnected, like trying to grip a cobweb. The result is something uncoordinated and unsatisfying for them both.

“Hey,” he whispers, breath caught in his chest, “why don’t we try the other way?”

They do. He sits up and pulls her gently into his lap, guiding her down when she sinks back against him. It gives her control over the angle, room to grip the headboard behind him, and ample opportunity to bend to kiss him, if she wants. 

It’s better. They find traction when she digs her knees into the mattress to pull herself forward, and when he lifts his hips to catch her on her way back down. Sensation builds in her pelvis, a coil twisting tight with tension; she closes her eyes and lets it.

He lays his hands against her hips to help keep her steady while she rocks back and forth. The touch is too-warm, clammy from his sweat and hers, and the placement of his palms feels off— strange— like he’s holding someone else. The longer she thinks about it, the more distracting it is— and she thinks about it a fraction of a second too long.

Their already unsteady rhythm stutters and fails. They pull apart when they should be coming together, and the cresting wave recedes again, leaving her taut with empty tension. She falls back against his thighs. He drops his forehead against her shoulder.

Her whole body burns with humiliation. 

“Dammit,” he says into her neck. His voice is breathless and gravelly. “... This isn’t working, is it?”

She closes her eyes. She can’t muster the motivation to start again.

“I don’t think so,” she answers softly.

He helps her off of him, big hands beneath her thighs. He’s gentle, but he can’t look her in the eye; he hands her the corner of the blanket, swings his legs off the side of the bed, and retreats into the bathroom. The door slides shut behind him, and the light flicks on beneath the crack.

She lays back down against the pillows. Water runs in the bathroom and keeps running, a rush of white noise. There’s no other option: she tries to sleep.

It doesn’t work. She’s still too tense; she feels aching and empty, deep in her pelvis. She rolls over, dragging the blanket with her, even though it’s still too warm and her sweat hasn’t had time to dry. She squeezes her thighs together, and that only makes the feeling worse.

The faucet in the bathroom is still running. She clenches her jaw, and slides her fingers between her legs. She means for it to be efficient and physical, purely relief, but her breath stutters at her own touch. Her hips roll, and her mind wanders: an open-mouthed smile against the side of her neck, warm water sluicing over her skin from a showerhead, clever fingers trailing down her stomach, then pressing deep, in and out, an electric, effortless rhythm.

They aren’t Katio’s hands. They’re smaller, blunter. She clenches her eyes shut against the details, but they seep in anyway, blurring the boundary between fantasy and memory. It scrabbles short nails down the outside of her thigh. It tickles bristly hair against the back of her shoulder.

“Fuck,” it pants into her neck, at the crook where her jaw meets her throat, “you’re so fucking beautiful.”

Everything snaps. She muffles her gasp into the pillow, and it’s like a rush of floodwater: relief and pleasure and release spilling in alongside guilt and shame and regret. The heaviest ones sink in her chest and catch there; when the feeling rushes back out, they’re all that’s left behind.

In the bathroom, the water stops, but it’s long minutes before Kaito comes back to bed. He sits behind her, on the edge of the mattress; she can’t see him, and she doesn’t turn around. Eventually, he curls back in beside her, with enough space between them not to touch.

Eventually, they sleep.

*

She leaves early for her run the next morning, before he wakes up. When she gets back, he’s already waiting for her: he has a pair of pre-made breakfast meals already on the kitchen table— oatmeal with bacon and juice— and is sitting cross-legged in a chair facing the door when it opens.

“You don’t want me,” he announces, matter-of-fact, with both hands on his knees.

She’s still in the entrance, the door hanging open behind her. “I’m sorry,” is all she can think to say.

He isn’t fazed. He smiles at her, and waves her apology away. “Eh. S’fine. That’s supposed to be the point of all this, right? You knock around with a buncha people you don’t want until you find the one you do.” She pulls the door shut, and he twists in his chair, tracking her as she steps past him into the kitchen. “That’s not what I wanna talk about, anyway.”

She isn’t sure that she wants to talk about anything at all. He has a determined look in his eye that reminds her of every time he had to stop halfway through their run, doubled-over, hands on his knees. She touches the side of the coffee maker, and it pings her device by proximity.

(To his credit: he never once gave up. He always kept going, and always finished with her.)

“Here’s the thing,” he goes on. “I couldn’t figure out what your deal was before, but I get it now.” He leans forward. “What _do_ you want?”

A mug locks into the machine. She looks back at him, over her shoulder. “Excuse me?”

His gaze doesn’t flinch. He repeats himself, matter of fact: “What do you want, Peko?”

The dispenser hums and whirrs. It’s recognized her profile over Kaito’s, and has adjusted the coffee preparation accordingly. She looks back down and watches coffee pour, full-bodied and dark.

“... Y’know,” he says, when the silence has stretched long enough, “most people here would say, ‘To find my Ultimate Match,’ or something.”

“Is that would you would say?” she asks him.

She can't see his face, but she can hear the incredulous pinch in his voice. “What?”

She thinks about the way his hands had felt on her skin, how they’ve always felt: strange, set wrong, like he was holding someone that wasn’t her. She doesn’t look up from the coffee machine.

“This isn’t just another relationship for you, either,” she says, “is it?”

He’s quiet. She can hear him drumming his fingers on the table, nails first. “Well— fine. Maybe not,” he admits. “Maybe you’re right. But at least I can say that I know what I’m looking for.”

The last of the coffee drips into her mug. There’s a click, and the mechanism keeping the mug in place unlocks. She slides it out of the dock and lets the broad side of it rest against her palm. It’s almost too hot to touch, but not quite.

She turns around to face him, and sets the small of her back against the ridge of the counter. “The system has a .2 percent failure rate,” she tells him. “... I’m not sure there is an Ultimate Match for me.”

“But is that what you want?” he presses.

“It doesn’t matter.” She takes a sip from her mug. The coffee is perfect, made exactly how she likes it. “No one is released from the system prematurely. This is the only option I have.”

“Bullshit,” he answers brightly, around a crooked smile. “The hell does that mean, your ‘only’ option? There’s as many options as you make for yourself!” 

“The system eliminates options,” she says. “It facilitates a choice by removing guesswork. That’s the point.”

He waves that away, too, impatiently, like he didn’t read the same materials and sign the same contract she did. “Whatever. Don’t think about the rest of it, just answer the question. What do you _want?_ ” 

Coffee sits on her tongue, thick and bitter. She swallows. “I don’t know.”

He nods once, decisive. “Then that’s where we gotta start.” He gestures widely at the table and the spread of food in front of him. “Now c’mon, sit down. You want cold bacon for breakfast?”

She joins him.

3  
WEEKS

They’re invited to a pairing day. It’s a modest gathering, held in a shady grove deep in the woods, with drooping trees and sun-dappled forest trails. The decorations are all in pretty pastel blue, stamped with the Hope’s Peak logo and two names, written in twining cursive: Sayaka and Tenko.

It’s been long enough that Peko can admit to being genuinely happy for her. The system hadn’t required that she and Kaito attend, but she had wanted to anyway; there’s success to be had in the system, and Tenko had always been eager to embrace it.

The couple receives guests in a line as they arrive. They’re both smiling and gregarious, picturesque in matching lace gowns. Tenko has a headband made of delicate white flowers tucked behind her ears. Her partner is someone Peko doesn’t recognize, a pretty woman with a round face and a soft, enigmatic smile.

Tenko gushes when Peko and Kaito arrive at the front of the line. She wraps Peko in a strong-armed hug, tightly enough to lift her briefly off her feet, and insists that they catch up when time allows. Her smile is tight. She and Sayaka don’t touch at all.

(Peko _is_ happy for her. The moment, though, doesn’t sit well in her stomach.)

The line moves on; there are a dozen more guests on their way in. She and Kaito are dispersed into the rest of the mingling crowd, and find a small high top table to sit by while they wait.

“You alright?” he asks. 

He’s brought her a glass of white wine; she takes it from him, and the first sip is too sweet, sticky on her lips. She answers, “Yes,” and his frown deepens. 

“... It’s strange,” she admits. “That’s all.”

He sits with her; beneath the table, the edge of his foot bumps companionably against the inside of her ankle. He twists around in his seat to surveil the crowd, elbows on the backrest behind him.

“What’re you gonna do?” he asks.

Her instinctive answer is, simply, nothing. It’s been years since she and Tenko were together. The calibration of the system’s algorithm for compatible matches is near perfect. It’s not her business.

The last few guests in the line process through. Tenko and her partner hug only briefly before they go their separate ways: Sayaka into the bulk of the crowd around the refreshment table, and Tenko away from it, towards the cordoned off area reserved for the ceremony.

There is a compact piano in painted seafoam green tucked into that corner. There’s no pianist at the keys.

Peko sets her wine glass down on the table. “Will you excuse me?”

*

Tenko’s gown is pale pink, with ruffled pleats swirling around her calves. She has to hike the skirt up and tuck it carefully beneath her legs to give herself enough room to sit at the bench of the piano, but she doesn’t play; she only runs the tips of her fingers over the ridges of the keys. 

She looks beautiful. She looks like she might cry at any moment.

“May I join you?” Peko asks.

Tenko startles. She sits up straight, and her fingertips come up to press against the corners of her eyes. “Peko!” She gathers the remaining ruffles of her dress into her lap, so that there’s more room available on the bench. “Of course! Of course. I want to hear _everything,_ start at the beginning!”

She’s holding her emotions in. It’s unlike her. 

Peko takes the open seat beside her. “I’m surprised,” she says. “I would have expected you to be spending most of the day with Sayaka.”

“Oh, well,” and Tenko’s smile is the same as before, strained at the edges, “we’ll have our whole lives to spend together, right? This is my last chance to see everyone, before I get discharged. I should make the most of it, shouldn’t I?”

“I see.” Peko looks at the piano. “Is Kaede coming today?”

Tenko’s expression freezes. “Wh-What?” she sputters. She has never been a graceful liar. “Why- Why would you think that?”

“Kaede plays the piano,” Peko explains.

“Right,” Tenko says. “Right. Um, I’m not sure! M-Maybe?” She toys with a skinny black key, running the edge of her nail between the grooves. “She was on the guest list. I… I asked if the system could make an exception, so she could play one more time. For- For me. Before...”

She turns her face away. 

She had told Peko all her hopes for her pairing day, when they were together. In the months since then, Peko has never met anyone else with as much enthusiasm for the system and its promises. But now, at what’s supposed to be the culmination of all the data and time and calculations, it all feels— wrong.

She needs to ask. “... Do you not want to be paired with Sayaka?”

Tenko looks stricken. “No!” she cries, face flushed. “No, I mean— it’s not that! We- We get along really well! It’s a good match. It’s an Ultimate Match!” She clutches at her skirt, and her smile strains. “So, it’s fine. Just have fun! It’s my pairing day, after all.”

“Tenko,” Peko says softly.

“Thanks for coming,” she says. She’s trembling, when she pulls Peko into another hug. “I’ll come find you later, okay?”

*

Peko doesn’t go back to the table; she follows one of the trails leading out into the forest instead, where it’s private and quiet and cool. Guests of the pairing day are only allowed to go so far, with plainclothes guards marking the edges of the perimeter, but that’s fine. She only intends to go as far as she needs.

(The ceremony will be starting soon. She’d rather not be present when it does.) 

She finds a place to sit and wait: a felled log at the edge of the trail, still sturdy despite age and time. It’s beautiful, in its own way— and it must be. The system’s environment is as carefully cultivated as anything else. The log is cut too cleanly at the base to have fallen on its own.

She sits. The noise of the celebration is too distant to hear, now.

She waits.

Upon entry into the system, all participants are instructed to leave their preconceived notions of themselves behind. The system is designed to calculate the true core of your self, they say: wants weighed against needs, preferences weighed against compatibility. It works, but only if you let it. Any attempts to control the profile the system constructs throw off the calibration.

Everything happens for a reason.

She pulls the device from her purse and holds it flat in both palms. It’s unassuming, dressed like an assistant, but it’s full of almost two and a half years of data, observations, extrapolations, and abstractions. Her profile, her self. Every thought, every urge, every want she’s ever had or will have or could possibly have.

She smooths her thumb over the glass, and whispers, “Usami.”

It hears her. It lights up, pulsing calmly around a dark center. “Yes, Peko?”

Her heart begins to pound. She has no intentions, she hasn’t even asked the question, but panic still clutches in her chest and swallows her voice.

Beyond the treeline, further up the path towards the pairing day celebration, someone screams.

*

By the time she makes it back up to the grove, whatever happened is already over. Tables have been upended in the center of the clearing, scattering food, silverware, and shattered porcelain all over the grass. The guards securing the event are missing, and the crowd has grown thick and unruly in the confusion. 

Kaito is taller than most. She spots a flash of his plum sweater when he swings his arm over the crowd, and shoves her way to him.

There is a woman with him, dark-haired and petite, in a deep burgundy dress. She only spares Peko a glance before she turns her attention back to the treeline, where the security guards should be, but aren’t.

“Hey,” Kaito says. He curls one hand around Peko's elbow, and cuts one shoulder past hers so that she isn’t jostled by other people squeezing past. “You okay? I didn’t see where you went, I thought— I dunno, maybe—”

“I’m fine,” she answers. “What happened?”

“Your friend, she—” He glances sidelong at the woman beside him, suddenly uncomfortable. “Well, I mean…”

“Your ex ran off in the middle of her pairing ceremony,” the woman fills in, without turning her head. “This idiot thought she was running to you.”

Peko looks. Beneath the twined, leaning trees that make up the centerpiece of the grove and the stage of the ceremony, Sayaka stands alone with her arms crossed over her stomach, staring into the woods, looking neither shocked nor sad.

*

In the end, the celebration is cut short. They’re shuffled out hours before the scheduled end of the event, and queue in long lines, waiting for transportation back to their living quarters. It’s hectic and unorganized. So much of the staff seems at a loss for words.

(People who claim to have been in the front row of the ceremony whisper that the taser missed Tenko’s calf by inches, when she ran.

Peko chooses to believe them.)

15  
DAYS

There are no official statements about the incident. It’s never brought up again, not even as an oblique warning disseminated through the devices. Instead, security presence increases across the community. There are double the guards at every entrance and exit of every venue and restaurant, and even periodic patrols around the central hub.

Peko wonders if the system profile takes that into account, too.

1  
DAY

The last night, they combine what’s left of the pre-packaged meals in the cupboard and eat them together out on the porch swing. It makes for a mishmash of a dinner: curried rice with lemon chicken and a pineapple-mango fruit salad. They don’t touch, or hold hands; they just eat, and appreciate the fading summer warmth together.

“I thought for sure it was gonna be you,” Kaito admits. He grimaces, and stabs at his chicken with more force than he needs to. “Back at that pairing day.”

She watches his plate. She’s never understood the leap of logic; she’d only considered it a strange but well-meaning misunderstanding on his part. She hadn't thought it worth bringing up. But there’s tension in his face, and a serious set to his jaw that she’s never seen on him before.

“... Why?”

He looks at her. She’s only known him to say exactly what’s on his mind, as soon as it comes into his mind, but over this, he takes a moment to decide.

“Look,” he says, “I know you said before that you didn’t know what you wanted. But… you ask me? I think it’s pretty obvious _what_ you want.” Her heart jumps, unbidden. His gaze holds her in place, determined and intense. “I think you just haven’t figured out what you’re gonna do about it.” 

Insects cry softly in the woods around their living quarters. It’s a low, steady hum of noise that keeps even the late summer nights from falling too quiet. She takes the coward’s way out: she drops her eyes, and lets the sound fill in the gaps of her own silence.

“Either way,” he says eventually, chasing the last few grains of rice around his place. “Whoever it was, I hope the two of ‘em made it.” It’s both uncharacteristically soft and unsure of him. “After all that... you gotta hope, right?”

Peko looks up at the smattering of summer stars beginning to peek through the darkening sky, like pinpricks in a falling curtain. “Yes,” she answers. “I hope so, too.”

END


	13. Maki Harukawa

5  
YEARS

Background noise roars to the front of his mind: clinks of silverware on ceramic, murmurs of conversation, the rush of the air conditioner. Somewhere across the restaurant, someone laughs too loud and too long, like they’re trying to make their partner feel good about themselves.

Five years is longer than any relationship in the system he’s ever heard of. It’s longer than he’s been in the system, period. This chick demanded that they check the expiration first, without any pleasantries, and now he’s stuck with her for five fucking years before he even knows her name.

She puts her device back down on the table, face-up.

“Usami,” she says. Her voice is flat. She won’t look at him. Her hair is dark and long, with heavy bangs that cut around the shape of her face. Everything about her is angular and harsh, even the narrow glare of her eyes and the quick clip of her voice. 

The device lights up in front of her. “Yes, Maki?”

“Calculate the expiration again.”

“Are you kidding me?” he says. “The fuck is that gonna do?”

She ignores him.

The ring around the face of her device is dark red, almost purple. It pulses for long seconds, trying to process the request. “There have been no mistakes in calculation,” it answers eventually. “All expiration dates are carefully calibrated in order to generate an accurate partner profile, which helps in selecting yo—”

It’s a stock response, obviously. He’s heard it before. “Look,” he starts. “I’m not exactly fuckin’ thrilled about this either—”

Maki still doesn’t look at him. Her nails curl into the tablecloth. “I said,” she says over them both, and her picture of calm objection cracks when her voice strains, “calculate it _again._ ”

The device doesn’t think about it this time. “There have been no mistakes in calculation,” it says again. “All expiration dates are carefully calibrated in or—” 

She swipes it off the table. It smacks against the back of the booth, clatters to the floor, and keeps on talking: “—ofile, which helps in selecting your Ultimate Match!” She doesn’t bend down to retrieve it. She just sits there, with her eyes on the tablecloth and her hands fisted in her lap. 

It’s an awkward silence.

The server comes by eventually: lemongrass beef for him, and chicken marsala for her. Neither of them have the appetite.

*

The house is the biggest he’s seen yet. It has a wall of wide bay windows, a nook with a desk and bookcase, a fucking _foyer,_ and she doesn’t seem fazed by any of it. When he stops to take in the small chandelier above the door, she strides right past him into the kitchen. He can hear the coffee machine whirring to life, and the _click_ of a mug locking into place.

“You been in a place like this before?” he asks her.

“They’re all the same to me,” she answers. “Just more of it.”

The lights follow him from room to room, fading in as soon as he crosses whatever invisible boundaries there are between them. She’s not entirely wrong: when he steps up into the bedroom, the layout of the room itself is more or less the same as all the others, just with more floor space and bigger furniture. The spare blanket is there, like it always is, folded in a wedge at the foot of the bed.

The couch out in the living area is a massive, blocky sectional. It has fluffy throw pillows and deep cushions. Five years is too long for anybody to sleep on any kind of couch, but it wouldn’t be bad for— how long? A couple weeks? A couple months?

Thinking about it again, the seventh fucking time in a goddamn row, is just— exhausting.

These are supposed to be committed relationships from day one. You’re supposed to skip the awkward beginning phase because you trust the system to do it for you. The system is supposed to work, if you let it. Up until now, he’s been doing everything his own way.

“Hey,” he calls, before he can think better of it, “you alright with sharing the bed?”

The coffee machine clicks again when it’s finished, releasing her mug into her hand. “Do whatever you want,” she answers. She steps down from the kitchen into the living area, glances at him long enough to tell him, “I don’t care,” and then walks straight out the front door.

He goes to bed alone that night.

1,814  
DAYS

She comes and goes. He usually sees her in the morning, after she comes back from some kind of workout, shiny with sweat. She showers, eats, and then leaves again, usually until the evening, when she comes back to sleep.

(He thinks she sleeps in the house, anyway. She never sleeps in the bed with him, and he’s never actually seen her, but he doesn’t know where the fuck else she’d go.)

What it means is: there’s a lot of time he needs to fill by himself. He still remembers the special command on the device, and so even though he doesn’t have a single fucking clue what he’s doing, he spends an afternoon ordering food. Eggs, ham, and rice seem reasonable to start. Vegetables are harder, but he gets what he can remember: mushrooms, spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant.

When she comes back the next morning, he’s ready. She walks straight past him (without a single fucking acknowledgement, a word, not even a _look_ ), and when he hears the bathroom door shut behind her, he piles everything on the kitchen counter and starts cracking eggs into a bowl.

He’s halfway through chopping a stack of mushrooms when the hiss of her shower on the other side of the house fades into silence. He doesn’t hear her behind him until she says, “What are you doing?” and he only just barely manages not to jump.

“Cooking,” he answers, without looking up.

“The system meals don’t come like that.”

“This one does.”

She comes up beside him, feet still silent on the tile even now that he knows she’s there. Her hair is wet; she scrunches it absentmindedly with a towel while she watches him fumble his way across the cutting board.

“This is stupid,” she decides. “It isn’t like the pre-made meals aren’t fresh. You’re wasting time for no reason.”

“Ain’t like I’m hurting for fuckin’ time.” Her gaze hits the side of his face. It might’ve been a step too far. “Just shut up and have breakfast with me.” He leans past her to dump his mushrooms into the pan. “I’m doing all the hard work already anyway. All you gotta do is eat.”

She looks at the pan, and then at him. “What about onions?” she asks.

_Shit._ “It’s- It’s fine, alright?” He piles spinach onto the cutting board, and tries to get it to stay in one place long enough to chop. “Just sit down. I got it!”

She doesn’t. She stays where she is, and watches him struggle a while longer. The problem with leafy vegetables is that they flop all over the place; he doesn’t know how anyone manages to get an even slice on anything.

“You’re cutting it wrong,” she tells him. She jostles his elbow with hers. “Move over.”

1,800  
DAYS

She starts lingering in the mornings. She comes back from her workout, showers, and then they make breakfast together. She’s a halfway decent cook, it turns out; she shows him the differences between chopping, dicing, and mincing, and teaches him the proper way to flip an omelette.

It’s harder than it looks; even with a fresh layer of butter on the bottom of the pan, he still fumbles the spatula and tears the edge of the egg. It’s fine, it’s edible, it’s just more obviously misshapen when he shimmies it onto a plate next to her perfect semicircle.

“You’re hopeless,” she says.

“Shut up.”

He thinks he catches her smile, just for a second, before she turns to take the plates. It’s barely there, just a slight curl at one edge of her mouth, but his chest swells with nonsensical pride anyway.

Her smile is gone by the time they sit at the table. His stupid confidence isn’t. “Let’s go somewhere after this,” he says.

She doesn’t look up; she’s focused on slicing through the center of her omelette without spilling the mushrooms. “Why?”

“‘Cause I’m gonna go fucking crazy cooped up in here, that’s why.” 

“So go somewhere. What do you need me there for?”

“You’re not seriously asking me to explain to you what a date is, right?”

She glares at him, but at least her eyes stay on him. She’s not stupid. She knew what he meant. She just has to make everything like this for some reason, like she’s dressed in concrete and he has to chip his way through to get to her. Sometimes it feels like she’s trying to plug up all his progress from the inside.

She takes a quick, sharp bite. The edges of her teeth scrape against her fork. “Fine.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah.” She has her face tilted down at the table, at a steeper angle than she needs to. She saws off another piece of her omelette, harder than she needs to. “Now shut up and eat.”

*

They go to the park. They each get a stacked ice cream cone (hers all chocolate, his dairy-free neapolitan) and she chooses a bench to sit on, down by the lake. They don’t talk much on the way there, or while they’re sitting, or at all. It’s fine. For once, he doesn’t mind.

“Hey,” she says, and it feels like an accident, like something that slipped out more than something she planned. He glances over, but she isn’t looking back at him; she’s watching a couple of ducks toddle down the bank to the water’s edge. Her nails are curled into the seat of the bench beneath her. “Why are you trying so hard to make this work?”

He looks out at the water, too. His ice cream is just about done; all that’s left is a multi-colored, melted swirl in the bottom of the cone. It’s a mess in the foreground of his vision, blurry against the smooth blue surface of the lake and the perfectly manicured park grass.

“What,” he answers, “you wanna spend the next five years fucking miserable?”

“I don’t even like you that much,” she says. He scoffs, and he gets the edge of her glare before she looks back at the water again. “Shut up. You don’t like me, either.”

“I dunno. There are worse people to get stuck with for five years.”

“There are better ones, too.”

He can't argue that.

“You’re my seventh relationship,” he tells her. “I’ve been in this place…” He tries to do the math; he gives up when he gets to Rantarou. “Fuck if I know. Almost three years? I _still_ couldn’t fuckin’ tell you how the system comes up with this shit. Might as well be random, for all I know.”

“Maybe it is,” she answers calmly.

“Maybe it is,” he agrees. “Maybe it’s not. But, look, the point is— who gives a shit?”

She lifts her head to look at him. 

“We’re together now. You and me. And I can keep— digging the same _fucking_ hole I have been this whole time, acting like I know shit when I don’t, or I can just… try.” He bites down on the last piece of his cone. “So I’m trying.”

She watches him a few seconds longer. She doesn’t raise any more objections, or ask him any more questions. They go right back to what they were doing before: sitting on a bench in silence, watching ducks swim around on a lake. It’s better this time, though. More comfortable.

“Come on,” she says, after a while. She sets her hand briefly on his knee when she stands up. “I want to walk to the bridge.”

*

That night, she follows him into the bedroom. It seems like a last-second decision; she nearly steps on his heels coming up behind him, and she falls back a step when he turns around, arms tight at her sides.

“Don’t get excited,” she warns, except she’s red enough in the face that it doesn’t have much bite behind it.

He rolls his eyes, even when his heart rate spikes. “Right,” he says, “whatever.”

They take turns getting ready in the bathroom. (He’s willing to make some compromises with the system, but stripping in front of her this early on isn’t one of them.) She sleeps with her hair down, it turns out, in an oversized t-shirt and a pair of shiny athletic shorts.

They face off on opposite sides of the bed.

She’s still stiff, glaring at some spot at the edge of the mattress, so he takes the dive first; he pulls the blankets back on his side and climbs in. She hovers at hers a second longer— and then she slides in like she’s testing a pool: warily, hesitantly, and then in feet-first. They both lay on their backs, staring at the ceiling. Neither of them try to bridge the strip of space between them. Neither of them say anything.

“Usami,” he says, when it’s been weird enough for long enough, “turn the lights off,” and the room goes dark.

He falls asleep faster than he expects to; the bed’s warmer with both of them in it.

59  
MONTHS

She’s up before him, most mornings. She goes for her workout before the sun is up, and comes back in time for them to have breakfast together. Sometimes she accidentally wakes him up before she leaves; most of the time she doesn’t. He’s used to the schedule.

Once, though, it’s the sound of the bathroom door sliding shut that does it. He rolls over, and she’s standing in the doorway watching him while she ties her hair into a single, high ponytail on the top of her head.

“Go back to sleep,” she says.

“It’s fuckin’ dark out.” He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes. “You go back to sleep.”

She doesn’t answer at first. She finishes tying off her hair, sighs deeply, and says, “That’s what you want? Fine.”

He doesn’t fully process it until she’s at the side of the bed again, and by then there’s no time to react. She climbs back onto the mattress, swings one knee up, and sits on his hips. It’s more aggressive than flirtatious.

“What the fuck,” he grunts. “Are you trying to come onto me, or are you trying to kill me?”

“Do you want to die?” she asks, deadpan.

“Fuck you, I’d like to see you fucking try.”

“Keep talking and I might.”

Kissing her is easy. It’s easier than he expects, anyway, and maybe easier than it should be. It’s just that she’s right there, warm and close, and she’s smiling a little bit, enough that he thinks she doesn’t know she’s doing it. All he has to do is sit up and tilt his head.

She goes rigid at first— like _he_ somehow surprised _her_ after she was the one who straddled him— but when he pulls back to give her space, she dips forward to close it again. Her lips are soft. She’s hesitant, sort of uncoordinated, but they find something comfortable together. She lets his arms slide around her waist, and lets hers drape over his shoulders.

It’s nice.

She pulls back enough to set her forehead against his. It flattens her bangs against her browline in a way that makes her look stupid, in a cute way. Her cheeks are pink. It brings out the color of her eyes.

He swallows the lump that rises in his throat. 

“That was stupid,” she tells him.

“It wasn’t bad, though.”

Her face gets redder. She swings her leg over him and off the side of the bed. “We’re wasting time,” she says. “I have to go. Make sure you prep the waffle batter before I get back.”

*

She doesn’t stop disappearing during the afternoons, but she does at least start telling him where she’s going: the gym, usually, or the park when she wants to be alone, or the woods behind their house to get some fresh air. More and more often, though, he steps down into the living area to find her on the couch, eating or reading or just sitting. He finds her like that a few days later; this time she has her device out, cupped in one hand while she swipes through options with the other.

He sits beside her, and whether it’s an accident or not, she lets herself list far enough towards him that eventually her shoulder is pressed against his. He peers over the edge of her arm. “What’re you doing?”

“Deciding on consent settings,” she answers, at the same time he registers the top option of her _Consent Specific_ menu: _digital sex, receiving partner._

He splutters without meaning to, right in her ear. She leans off of him with a glare, but the tops of her cheeks are pink. “You don’t have to freak out over it,” she says. “I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m deciding for me.”

“That’s not it! I just—” He scrambles for an excuse. “This isn’t the kinda thing we should be doing separately, right? It defeats the fuckin’ purpose!”

It’s the wrong argument to make. It just gives her a wide-open door. “So fill it out with me.”

“I—”

“Relax.” She draws her legs up so that she’s sitting cross-legged on the couch, facing him. “We’re not going to have sex right now. I need to go to the gym after this.”

“Great,” he mutters. His device isn’t even far away, it’s just in his pocket. He goes digging for it when she just keeps staring at him expectantly. “Just— fuckin’ great.”

When he looks up again, she’s smiling— briefly, barely, but there.

They start at the top of the list.

1,785  
DAYS

They’re invited to a pairing day. Both of their devices ping at the same time, early in the morning, and give them the same rote message: “The Hope’s Peak community is coming together in celebration of a perfect match! If you’d like to attend, please be available for pickup at one o’clock this afternoon!”

She goes. He doesn’t. She doesn’t try to hassle him into going with her; she doesn’t even seem that excited to go herself. She doesn’t explain _why_ she goes— but there’s a part of him that thinks he might understand anyway. He doesn’t ask.

In the end, it turns out that he made the right choice, for once. She gets dropped back off at the house not even two hours later, glowering and surly, and dumps her bag on the ground by the door.

“Come on,” she says. “I need air.”

*

She takes him back to the park, back down to the lake. It’s a regular afternoon; there are plenty of people around, out enjoying the waning days of summer. There are a couple of open benches, but she sits in the grass at the water’s edge anyway, her fancy satin dress hiked up around her hips. He sits with her, and tosses stones across the water while she goes through the story.

It was a shitshow, it turns out.

“They were in the middle of the ceremony,” she tells him. “Not that it means anything, anyway. The whole thing’s just for show. But she still just—” She glares, first out at the water, and then down at her knees. “It was stupid. There’s no way she made it.” 

He skips a stone. It jumps four times on the surface of the lake, and then sinks. “At least she tried,” he says. “Better that than shackling yourself to some bullshit life with someone you know you don’t want to be with.”

“Don’t be an idiot.” She picks at the grass beside her until it starts to turn up dirt. “It’s worthless if you get caught.”

“It’s better than giving up, isn’t it?”

Her answer is flat: “No.”

It’s concrete again. It annoys him, more than he expects it to. He throws another stone, hard, but he still can’t seem to do better than four skips. “Bullshit,” he says. “Since when are you such a fuckin’ doormat?”

Her jaw clenches. She tears blades of grass between her fingers and throws the pieces away. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know that fronting a cancellation fee after getting kicked out is better than making yourself miserable your whole life.”

She sits up suddenly, dropping her legs flat in the grass in front of her. She pulls her device from the hidden pocket of her dress. “Usami.”

“Yes, Maki?” 

She twists at the waist to face him; he’s never seen that look on her face before, flat but dark. She has her eyes on his face when she says, “What happens when a participant is banished from the system?”

“That’s a great question!” it chirps, saccharine as ever. It doesn’t bother to dial it back even a _little._ “A banished participant is considered in breach of contract with Hope’s Peak, and as a result relinquishes entitlement to participation in the system and all of its guaranteed deliverables. To prevent any confounding impacts on the other participants, banished participants are subsequently removed from the community and held for release at the discretion of Hope’s Peak staff!”

“What?” falls out of his mouth before he can stop himself.

It’s layered underneath jargon and blame-shifting and that same bullshit peppy voice, but the meaning is there: it’s a jail sentence. The people who get caught aren’t kicked out of the system. They never leave the system at all.

He thinks about Natsumi.

Maki hasn’t flinched. She stares him down and says, “How long is Hope’s Peak authorized to keep a banished participant in custody?”

“All participants signed a time commitment waiver at the start of their participation,” it answers. “Participants agree to be held within the Hope’s Peak community indefinitely, until their Ultimate Match is selected or at the discretion of Hope’s Peak staff.”

“Bullshit,” he tries. “I don’t- I don’t remember that! I never would have fucking signed it if that was in it!”

“Usami,” Maki says calmly, “read back section two, paragraph three—”

He can’t listen to it. All this _bullshit,_ the fucking _system_ — “Alright! I get it! I fucking get it, okay?!”

A couple further down the bank glances at them, and then puts more space between them. The handful of ducks that had been cautiously investigating them turn tail and swim in the opposite direction.

Maki drops her device into the grass.

“I don’t know why it bothers you so much,” she says. Her tone isn’t tight with anger anymore, but what it’s turned into doesn’t make him feel any better. “It doesn’t matter as long as you don’t break the rules. Didn’t you say you were falling in line with the system?”

He didn’t say that. He never fucking said that. But if he’s really, genuinely honest with himself, it was what he was trying to do— so he demands, “How come you even know this shit at all?” instead.

She’s quiet for a long moment. She tugs the hem of her dress back down over her knees. “Because,” she says, “someone asked me to leave with him.”

He glances at her. She doesn’t look back; she’s watching the water again, and he’s never seen this look on her face before, either: soft and sad. “I wanted to know what the consequences would be if it didn’t work.” She lays her palm flat over the face of her device. “So I asked.”

“And?”

“What do you think?” She doesn’t sound upset, just… tired. Resigned. “The system matched us for one night. Twelve hours. Doing something like that over so little is stupid, no matter what it— felt like.” She closes her eyes. “I decided it wasn’t worth the risk. So I said no.”

He thought thirty-six was short. Twelve is nothing, but Maki— made of concrete Maki— still considered it. 

“What was it like?” he finds himself asking.

She sighs. “It doesn’t make any more sense when I explain it.”

“Just try. If I don’t get it, then you get to be right, huh? How about that?”

“I’d be right anyway.” She’s trying to act aloof, but the resistance feels half-hearted. Her eyes lose some of their focus. “I don’t know. It was different. Being with him felt comfortable. It felt… natural. Like we were both where we were supposed to be when we were supposed to be there.” The tips of her fingers curl into the fabric of her skirt. “I kept thinking that if we’d just had more _time,_ then—”

She stops talking, and doesn’t start again.

He says, “Oh.”

She breathes in deeply. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she says. “He’s an idiot. I’m not about to take that kind of risk over half a day and some— feeling.”

She stands up and brushes loose grass from the pleats of her skirt. She stares out across the water, and he should say something, because he gets it. He understands. All at once, he understands.

“I’m tired,” she says. “Let’s go home.”

1,780  
DAYS

It’s like taking ten steps backwards. The walls build themselves back up. If she were angry he might be able to handle it better, but she isn’t; she’s distant, cold, withdrawn.

Five years is a long time.

All he can do is start over.

1,774  
DAYS

“You have someone, too,” she says.

They’re both getting ready for bed. She’s in the bathroom with the door open, eyes on her own reflection; he’s halfway through undoing the buckle on his belt. He flounders. It doesn’t sound like she’s asking. 

“I didn’t—”

“You didn’t have to,” she says. She tugs the tie out of her hair, and shakes her fingers through the strands.

There’s nothing else to say. It’s the truth. The best he can manage is: “... Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Better to get it out of the way now, so we both know where we stand.”

She’s not wrong, but it just… fucking _sucks._ They’re not even each other’s consolation prizes. This is going to end too, eventually. It’s all just one long, bullshit delay tactic.

She comes out of the bathroom. She’s already wearing the big t-shirt she sleeps in. “So we’re clear,” she says, “I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad about leaving. Just don’t be stupid about it.” She steps up to him until they’re toe-to-toe. Her expression is stern, but it feels fragile. “And passing up what you want because of me counts as being stupid.”

He doesn’t want to talk about this. He doesn’t want to go down that road again, for the hundredth, thousandth, billionth time. He’s supposed to be trying this, with her. He’s supposed to be following the system’s plan, now.

So he kisses her.

She leans into it. There’s no hesitation, no indecision, but there is something else in it that feels— messy, maybe desperate. He isn’t sure if it’s coming from him, her, or both of them. He cups her face. Her fingers fall on the open loop of his belt.

Panic spikes in his chest. He clamps his hand over hers. “Hang on,” he hisses, “hold- hold on.”

“We did that part already,” she says blandly, like he’s being intentionally difficult. “Remember?”

“Yeah, but... That was weeks ago. I’m not gonna assume—”

“If I changed my mind, I would’ve changed the settings,” she says. “Have you changed yours?”

He swallows. He lifts his hand, and gives her room to work. She tugs his belt from his pants, shucks her shirt up over her head, and her movements are confident, but her hands are shaking. Her face is red. Her underwear is plain white cotton, simple and practical.

Her palm wraps around the back of his neck, and her kiss is searing, biting, breathless. 

She falls back against the bed, and drags him with her. He fumbles for the bedside table, half bent over her, and then she has to take the little foil packet away from him, before he tears it the wrong way.

She lets him pin her to the mattress, but she’s the one controlling the pace. She hooks her knees around his hips, and pulls him in or pushes him back when his rhythm isn’t right where she wants it. He’s just along for the ride, dragged along by the rising, twisting feeling in his pelvis. 

“Maki,” he gasps.

She opens her eyes. In the darkness, a few shades of difference don’t matter at all. It snaps through him like a broken rubber band: sharp, gasping relief and stinging pain all at once. She tucks her chin into the crook of his neck, and it’s only then that his pathetic little groan registers in his own ears.

He coaxes her the rest of the way there with his fingers; she clings to his shoulders, nails sharp against the back of his neck, and muffles the small, whimpering sound she makes when she comes against his collarbone. 

He pretends not to hear it. Only fair to return the favor.

*

He wakes up the next morning with her tucked into his chest, his arm around her waist. She’s awake too, he can tell from the pattern of her breathing, but she doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t, either. 

It’s comfortable. 

It’s fine.

That’s all.

1,763  
DAYS

His device chimes while he’s chopping mushrooms for breakfast. He’s hungry and his hands are already damp, so he calls to it instead of stopping: “What d’you want, Usami?”

It answers, cheerful as ever, “Another participant would like to say goodbye.” 

His fingers are suddenly clumsy. The edge of the knife cuts way, way too close to the flat of his hand, and Maki snaps something at him he doesn’t fully hear, her fingers clamping down over his wrist. 

“You’ve been invited to a short farewell meeting tonight at 7:30,” it goes on. “Would you like to accept?”

The tone the device uses never fucking changes. Everything always sounds like it’s supposed to be good news, or make sense, or _anything_ other than making him feel like his fucking lungs don’t work anymore. He shakes off Maki’s hand.

“What the fuck does that mean?” he barks, at the device, at her, at the room.

“You know what it means,” Maki says, and she has the fucking audacity to lower her voice, like it’s somehow gentler that way.

The device goes on talking. “After hearing feedback from past participants, Hope’s Peak has implemented a farewell period for paired participants as an opt-in trial feature! Our research shows that the farewell period provides a sense of resolution and closure to a previous relationship, allowing the new one to thrive more easily.” It sounds more like a goddamn ad than an explanation. “Someone has selected you for their farewell.”

“Someone,” he repeats. His throat is thick. He still has the chef’s knife in one hand. “You’re not going to tell me who it is?”

“Would you like me to tell you?” the device asks in return.

Maki sets her hand against his arm again, gripping him at the elbow this time. He almost forgot she was still there. “Don’t you already know?” she hisses. “You actually want her to say it out loud?”

“Tell me,” he says.

“Relationship number four: Peko Pekoyama.”

Maki was right. He did already know. It’s still like a hit to the solar plexus to hear it out loud, and he abruptly wishes he hadn’t bothered, wishes he’d just said what he was always going to say when it first asked.

“... I’ll go.”

“Your response has been registered. Thank you, Fuyuhiko!”

Maki reaches down to pry his fingers off the knife, and this time he lets her. She finishes chopping the vegetables, and dumps them into the pan.


	14. Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu

“Congratulations, Peko! The system has found your Ultimate Match!”

It’s early in the morning, before the sun has had the chance to rise. She’s on the floor of her individual housing unit, still in the process of putting on her shoes. The announcement shatters the delicate pre-dawn silence abruptly enough that it makes her ears ring; when the device doesn’t elaborate any further, that silence creeps back in, heavier than before.

The individual units are efficiencies. They aren’t designed in the same warm, inviting style as the the main community living quarters, and they’re only meant to be in use for days at a time, while relationships are calculated and coordinated; Peko has only been in this one a single night. It’s there on the floor of that cold, cramped space that she realizes: this is the moment that had been advertised to her. 

The feeling of being told that there’s a person on the other side of the system, someone who has been waiting to reach you, too— every testimonial had touched on it in some way or another. A perfect fit. A compatible other. The culmination of so many relationships, of all the time and the doubt and the struggle. It had been the main thrust of the argument to sign on to the system: the relief from choice, the excitement of possibility, and all of that coming together in the moment you’re told you’ve reached the end.

The introductory materials had warned her that that moment, this moment, could feel overwhelming. It is, but not the way they promised.

She isn’t prepared for the way raw emotion suddenly swells in her chest, cold, clawing, and painful. It spirals out too quickly to control, crowding her heart and throat, and when she touches her fingers to the inside corners of her eyes, the tears are already there.

She had expected that this would come eventually; a profitable company can only expend resources on a failed attempt for so long. She hadn’t expected it to come so soon, though, or that it would feel like— this. More than disappointment, or resignation; it’s familiar, scathing loss, like the tip of a knife splitting open scar tissue.

She presses her hand flat against her eyes. The device rattles off the details of her pairing (the celebration is at 2:30 PM tomorrow afternoon, the location is to be determined, a dress will be provided in her preferred style), and she cries, there on the floor of her single-occupancy unit.

“In addition,” the device goes on, still cheerful, “after feedback from past participants, Hope’s Peak has implemented a farewell period as an opt-in trial feature. Would you like to participate in the trial?”

Her heart sticks in her throat. She has to swallow it down to find her voice. “... What is that?”

“It’s an opportunity to say goodbye to an individual of your choosing,” it answers. “Our research shows that the farewell period provides a sense of resolution and closure to a previous relationship, allowing the new one to thrive more easily.” 

Her tears have left her cheeks cold in the early morning air. She swipes them from her face with the heel of her hand.

It’s a choice. Choices in the system are so few and far between that it feels foreign to be given such a monumental one now, with such little fanfare; time is the most precious resource the system has to offer, and now she has more of it to do with what she wants.

What does she want?

“Do I need to answer right now?” she asks.

“Of course not! Take all the time you like!”

She finishes tying off her sneakers, and pulls herself to her feet.

*

She doesn’t follow the normal route for her run. She doesn’t follow any route. She could go in any direction at all from the individual housing building and still find her destination.

“Peko,” her device warns from her shoulder, “you are approaching the boundary of the participant area. Failure to stay within the bounds of the community is considered a breach of system rules, and may result in banishment.”

She stops. The device chimes, “Thank you!” and goes silent.

There’s no visible boundary. There’s only grass, in front of and behind her. The wall towers over this section of the community; this close, it cuts through most of the sky, and this early, it blocks out most of the light from the sun. She’s swallowed by the shadow it throws across the field, and it’s cold enough to raise goosebumps on her exercise-warm skin.

She pulls the device free from the strap on her arm. The face lights up to acknowledge her, and reads simply:

PAIRED

“Usami,” she says.

The colored border around the face pulses to acknowledge her. “Yes, Peko?”

The question rises to her tongue again, and brings with it the same heart-pounding, breath-stealing panic as before. It tangles in her chest, and tries to drag the words back down. There are no interruptions this time, though. There’s nothing and no one left to influence the choice. There is only her, and that fear.

What does she want?

She breathes out. She closes her eyes. She asks: “What happens when a participant is banished from the system?”

“That’s a great question!” The answer is immediate. It must be a pre-programmed response. “A banished participant is considered in breach of contract with Hope’s Peak, and as a result relinquishes entitlement to participation in the system and all of its guaranteed deliverables. To prevent any confounding impacts on the other participants, banished participants are subsequently removed from the community and held for release at the discretion of Hope’s Peak staff!”

It’s clear, if not transparent. This is what’s at stake, and there is no misunderstanding the consequences. It should feel like weight piled on— but instead it sloughs off, like a heavy coat sodden from the rain. She hadn’t realized how light she could feel, just from knowing.

The system has a .2 percent failure rate. The system _reports_ a .2 percent failure rate. She wonders how much of that figure is made up of people like Sakura, or Mukuro, or Tenko. She wonders how many of them got far enough to be counted, and how many of them have been buried.

She wonders if their stories can really be considered failures.

She can see the staff-only road from here, a sliver of black pavement at the base of the wall. Beyond it, there is a broad, steel maintenance ladder. There are no vehicles. There are no guards. 

“Peko,” the device reminds her, “any attempt to leave the Hope’s Peak community before your pending discharge date is considered a breach of system rules, and may result in banishment.”

She looks back down at the device. It still reads _PAIRED_ at the center. “I know,” she answers. “... I have one more request.”

“Of course! How can I help?”

She smooths her thumb over the text on the screen. She could leave right now. It would take the system less than a moment to register and report what she’d done, but by then it would already be too late.

She could. But what does she _want?_

“I’d like to opt in to the farewell period.”

“That’s great! Which participant would you like to invite for your farewell?”

Emotion swells in her chest: warm, aching, and wonderful. 

She says, “Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu.”

“Thank you! Your choice has been submitted. You will be notified when your selected participant either approves or rejects your request.” 

She waits. The sun is finally beginning to peek over the top edge of the wall; he’ll be up by now, either having breakfast or finishing it. She can only hope that today isn’t a day he’s decided to sleep in, or shower late, or set his device in another room to give himself space from it. She’ll still wait. But she needs to plan, too. 

It’s only a minute or so. The device chimes again, and adrenaline leaps into her veins, a quick, dizzying turn. “Your request for the farewell period has been accepted!” 

She didn’t realize how tightly she’d been clutching the edges of the device until her hands relax and her knuckles begin to ache. It’s time he doesn’t need to afford her, but he’s given it to her anyway. She has time.

“Please arrive at the central hub tonight at 7:30.” the device goes on. “Thank you for your participation in the trial! All data submitted to the system is leveraged to make the experience better for all participants.”

It still gleams _PAIRED_ up at her in stark, white letters.

The build is light, just a pane of glass in a sturdy, soft-touch plastic shell. She picks out a tree a few dozen yards away, and balances the weight of the device in one palm. 

“Is there anything else?” she asks it.

“That’s all!” it answers. “Feedback concerning the farewell period will be collected at the same time as the standard participant survey. Please feel free to enjoy the rest of your time with the Hope’s Peak community!”

“Thank you.”

She aims for a low-hanging branch at the base of the tree’s canopy. It chirps, “You’re welcome!” in her ear, and then she throws it as hard as she can, as far as she can, so that the force of it reverberates back up into her shoulder. 

She doesn’t wait to see where it lands.

*

There are four security guards stationed at the entrance of the restaurant: two beside the automatic doors and two inside the waiting area. There are two more in the main dining room itself, sat separately at tables in opposite sections, for six total.

All of them pick her out of the crowd on her way in.

None of them follow her, and none of them move to stop her. The muscles behind her shoulders tighten anyway; she’s violated the spirit of the rules, if perhaps not the letter of them. Her neck and ears prickle. She folds her hands together in front of her to keep them still and steady.

The dining room is bustling. It’s a common time for the system to arrange meetings, especially between newly matched couples. There are people finding each other all around her, for better or for worse, and beneath all the chatter and laughter, she can hear the delicate chime of devices revealing their expiration dates. 

It’s strange. She’s been in this room so many times, at these tables with so many people, but now she feels out of place, like she’s encroached somewhere she doesn’t belong.

She supposes she doesn't, anymore.

Without her device to guide her, she can only hover at the front of the dining room and scan the available tables. That feels strange, too— but in an exciting, bubbling way that steals her breath straight from her chest. She goes methodically, section by section and table by table, until—

There.

He’s dressed nicely. She recognizes the dark navy jacket he’s chosen; it’s softer against his skin tone than some of the others in his closet, and it cools the colors of his eyes until they’re more green than gold. She always thought it suited him. It still does.

He’s standing beside an empty booth, waiting for her.

There’s nothing left to hold the feeling back. It rises plainly in her chest, like a long sip of warm tea, or a gulp of hot air. It burns, almost on the edge of too much, and then settles, spreads, warms her from the center out. It lights up something inside her, something she never knew was there before it turned dim.

It’s overwhelming. It’s exhilarating. It carries her feet before she realizes what she’s doing, cutting through the crowd and the restaurant to reach him.

He turns before she’s halfway across the dining room. His eyes find hers, and the complicated bloom of surprise and pain on his face is enough to startle perspective back into her. This isn’t a reunion unless he decides for it to be. She’s wasted enough time already assuming his motivations for him.

She stops a step short of where she would otherwise. She twists her hands into the fabric of her skirt, and hears herself say, “Hello.”

The edge of his mouth pulls to one side. It’s brief, a flicker, and not even necessarily positive, but still: it’s good to see him smile. His tie is already straight, but his hand still comes up to adjust the knot. “Hi.” 

They look at each other. He has his device in one hand, the face pressed loosely against his middle. “Do you, uh.” He gestures widely at the table. “Do you wanna sit?”

They’ve sat in this exact booth in this exact restaurant before, but now the seats feel narrower somehow. They’re intended to be intimate; perhaps it’s not the best choice of location for a meeting like this one. She holds herself at the edge of the cushion, to give him what she hopes is enough space. 

The silence is uncomfortable. 

His device chimes in his hand. It’s a notification; their countdown has begun. He turns the face up in his lap— and his expression flattens into stone. 

“How long do we have?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer. He tosses the device into the center of the table, so that she can see the timer.

Five minutes. Less, now.

“They sure talked a big fuckin’ game about a— ‘sense of resolution and closure,’” he says, and it’s calloused, like a buildup of grit in his throat. He can’t seem to look her in the eye. “We’re supposed to do that in five minutes?”

It’s less than she expected, that’s true. But it’s fine. No amount of time would have been enough; no amount of time has ever been enough. It’s five minutes more than she had before now, and she’s determined not to squander any it.

“Could I start?” she asks.

His eyes flicker to her face. It’s brief, uncertain. His jaw sets, and he glances at the timer again, slipping away by milliseconds. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

She knows what she wants to say. It’s there, fluttering, at the top of her throat. She swallows once, and then again to be certain her vocal cords are steady. “I wanted to thank you, first,” she tells him, “for agreeing to see me. I know that the way we left things the last time we spoke was… unpleasant.” He looks away, at the back of the booth. She can only keep going. “You asked if we could have time to talk, and I—”

His eyes clench shut. It’s a grimace, like he’s in pain. “It’s fine,” he says, strained. “Peko, it- it’s fine. You never owed me anything like that.”

She lays her hand next to his on the table. She’d take it, if she were brave enough, but she isn’t. She focuses on the first knuckle of her right hand. 

“Maybe not,” she agrees. “But now I think… I owe it to myself.” 

Her heart begins to pound. It’s familiar fear by now. The sound of it fills her ears, even above the noise of the restaurant around them. Making the decision and executing it are two separate tasks; as long as the door stays closed, stepping back from the threshold is still an option.

She can feel him looking at her. “... What’s that mean?” he asks.

She struggles.

The tips of his fingers brush the inside of her wrist. It’s a careful, hesitant touch. “Hey.” His eyes are soft, when she finds them. “Whatever you gotta say, I came here because I wanted to hear it. Alright?”

The fear doesn’t fade. But something else slides in over top of it, something sturdy enough for her to find her footing.

“I’m going to leave,” she says. “Tonight.”

His face is exactly as expressive as she remembers; she watches the way dawning understanding blanches his skin and flattens his mouth. He must know. Part of her hoped he wouldn’t. Briefly, dangerously, she wonders what made him ask.

“What?” His eyes jump up, beyond her shoulder; the guards are still there, and she can still feel them watching her. His volume drops to a hiss. “Do you know what could happen if they catch you?”

“Yes.”

He nearly chokes on his objection. “Peko—”

They’re losing time. There’s so much to say, so much to explain, and she wishes they had the time for it all, but they don’t. She sits up, and slides both arms across the table, between his. She finds bravery enough to cover his forearm with one hand. “Please,” she murmurs. “Will you listen?”

He settles, with effort. She can feel where his nails curl up into her elbow. He’s gentle, even as emotional as he is. She knew he would be.

“I tried to follow the path the system drew for me,” she says. “I thought that was what I wanted. The simplicity, the certainty. It made sense, at the time.” She swallows back the discomfort in her throat. She wants to look away, to find where his thumb is tracing a careful, soothing circle around the knob of her elbow, but she can't. Not now. “The past few months, that path has felt… winding, and unfamiliar. More so than it ever did before. I thought… if there is a .2 percent failure rate, it must be this. It must be me.” He wants to say something; she can see it rising behind his expression. She smiles at him, for him, to reassure him. “But I’ve realized— it isn’t. I wasn’t. It felt unfamiliar because I didn’t belong there anymore. I wanted something else.”

The truth is in her throat. Her heart is pounding, and for the first time she doesn’t let it pulverize what she needs to say.

“I want you,” she tells him. “If you’ll consider coming with me.”

His breath hitches in his chest.

It may be too late. It may be that their relationship has endured too much damage to be salvaged. It may be that he’s decided to embrace the system after all. That’s fine; she had prepared herself for rejection.

She isn’t prepared for the silence. It stretches, painful and deep— and all she can do is wait.

“... What if I say no?” he asks, finally, and it’s so soft, barely a rasp in his throat. “What’ll you do then?”

“Then I’ll leave on my own,” she answers. He deserves the truth, in whatever form he asks for it. “I don’t want the life the system chose for me. I want to choose for myself. And I...” Her breath is short. She has to take a moment to find it again. “Even alone, I think... having that is worth the risk.”

He reaches across the table with his free hand to take back his device. The timer is still running— too fast, it seems to her— but she doesn’t want to rush him. She’s said what she came to say. The rest of the time is his.

“Y’know,” he says eventually, “I used to think I had all this shit figured out.” He frames the face of the device between his thumb and forefinger, almost too tightly, almost white-knuckled. “Before, at the aquarium, I... I wanted—” His brow pinches down. He’s searching for words. “... time, I guess. I thought if I had a couple minutes to just— lay out my plan, I could convince you.” He snorts, a bitter sort of laugh. “I say _plan_ like I knew what the fuck I was doing. I had no fucking clue. I didn’t even think that far ahead. I was just… so sure that if we had more _time,_ we’d... I dunno.” His chin drops down towards his chest. He sounds deflated. “Maybe we could figure it out. On our terms, no fuckin’— rules, or expiration dates, or algorithms, or… whatever. Just us. That’s it.”

Her chest is tight. “And now?” she asks.

He lets the device fall back to the table; it clatters noisily, even from such a short height. He looks at it, and doesn’t reach for it again.

“Now… Now, I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe the system got it right.” His jaw works. “Maybe we’re a bad fit.”

The answer is plain. She feels it, viscerally, in the way the brightness in her chest cracks, but doesn’t extinguish. It hurts, but she had been prepared for that. She knew this outcome was a possibility. He doesn’t owe her anything, either.

It’s inappropriate to still be touching him the way she is. She tries to draw her arm back to her side of the table— but his hand collides clumsily with the underside of her wrist before she can. 

“Hang on,” he blurts. His fingers curl loose and unsure around her forearm. When she looks, his head is low. “Just— wait. Gimme a sec. Please.”

She lowers her elbow back to the table.

He takes several seconds. The timer is right there, and she counts them without meaning to: seven, in total. He swallows hard. He manages to look at her again, and there’s something cracked and raw behind his eyes.

“I just—” He exhales harshly. He sounds breathless, helpless, torn, and it makes her chest ache. “Fuck, I’m fucking _crazy_ about you, Peko. I haven’t stopped thinking about you this entire time. Not- Not one day. Not even when I wanted to. Not even when I tried.”

“Neither have I,” she says softly.

He smiles like shattered glass: less like he means to and more like reflex from an impact.

Possibility sparks in her chest. It’s unplanned, and even more fragile for it, but she lets it fuel her anyway. “Some things can’t be calculated,” she tells him. “I’ve realized that some things are… complex, and impractical, or painful,” and the two of them are nothing if not that, all of that and more, “but… also beautiful, and worth working to preserve.” She curls her hand gently over his, just the tips of her fingers against his wrist, and their palms cupped together. “I’m willing to try. I want to try.”

His gaze drops to their hands, tangled together on the table. He closes his eyes. He breathes in slowly.

“Fuyuhiko,” his device chirps, “any attempt to leave the Hope’s Peak community before your pending discharge date is considered a breach of system rules, and may result in banishment.”

“If we did this,” he says, “it- it’d be a fresh start. We wouldn’t be picking up where we left off, we’d be starting over. Blank slate. And if it doesn’t work...” His thumb dips into the heart of her palm. “Then at least we’ll be the ones deciding that. Right?” 

His touch is warm. Her chest is warm. She can only manage a whisper: “I’d like that.”

He nods, shallow. “Okay.” Then again, decisive. “Okay.”

His device chimes on the table between them, a definitive, familiar tone. 

She knows before she looks.

END

Gone. That’s all the time the system will ever afford them. Altogether, it isn’t even very much: a moment across a buffet table, six months in a cottage by the woods, a few seconds in an aquarium exhibit, and five minutes to say goodbye. Any more, they’ll have to take for themselves.

She feels nauseous. Her heart is beating fast enough to be painful. She wants more. She wants as much as she’s able to have, as much as he’s willing to give. The possibility is so close now that the thought of losing it makes her feel like her head is spinning off her shoulders.

“I’m afraid,” she whispers.

“Yeah. I’m really fuckin’ scared, too.” He is. She can feel the tips of his fingers trembling against her skin. But she recognizes the determined set of his jaw for what it is. “It’s not just you or me on our own anymore, though. We’re in this together now.” There’s a breath of hesitation. It’s an honest question when he says, “Right?”

She focuses on him: the ring of green around his pupils, the line of freckles across the bridge of his nose, the boyish curve of his jaw, the low timbre of his voice, the tickle of his thumb across her skin.

She says, “Yes.”

He smiles at her, broad, honest, and warm. It’s so good to see him smile. “So.” He squeezes her fingers once, and then he lets her go. “What’s the plan?”

She picks up the device from the table. It isn’t calibrated to respond to her; the glass face stays smooth, mirror black when she touches it. It reflects her own face back at her, framed by the white plastic shell.

She holds it out to him.

“Take this with you when you go,” she tells him. “You haven’t broken any rules yet, so they should let you pass.” 

He doesn’t understand; she can see the confusion creep from the corners of his eyes up to the line of his brow. He takes it from her anyway, carefully, and the face lights up when his thumb makes contact with the glass. 

“After that,” she says, “you need to run.” He reacts exactly how she expects him to: his confusion morphs sharply into indignation. She keeps talking anyway. They’re running out of time. “To the departure dock and then south, to the wall. Can you do that?”

The first thing he asks is: “What about you?”

“The farewell period has ended,” the device says. “Please exit the restaurant so that the table may be cleared for other participants!”

“They were never going to let me leave this building,” she says, and she’s reasonably certain it’s true. She’s been without her device for hours, but not long enough for it not to have picked up on her intentions. “I can act as your distraction.”

He doesn’t like it. She knew he wouldn’t, but their options are limited. “So- So what? What then?” His eyes keep jumping above her shoulder. The guards haven’t moved, but they will if they stay here much longer. “You can’t ask me to just leave you here.”

“I won’t let them stop me.” 

It’s easier to say than she expects. Her fear hasn’t receded, but her determination has swelled. They’re doing this together; she won’t leave him alone.

The ring around the face of his device flashes red. “The farewell period has ended,” it repeats, more sternly now than before. “Participants must exit the restaurant, or security will be called.”

She presses against the edge of it to force it back against his palm. “You need to go,” she whispers. “Now.”

His eyes roam her face. She can see the moment his decision is made, in his quick, short inhale and forceful squaring of his shoulders. He slides the device into his interior jacket pocket, swings his legs out of the booth, and stands up.

It's a threshold crossed. There's no turning back.

She gives him room enough, and then she stands up, too. The vast majority of the other diners haven’t noticed them, or at least haven’t registered them as worth paying mind to; the couples sat near them don’t even glance away from their conversations. 

All six of the security guards in the room do.

Fuyuhiko steps away from table, and from her. He glances back only once, and then he makes his way down the aisle on his own.

There’s resistance: two guards at the entrance are standing shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking the door. Under any other circumstances, maybe, they wouldn’t have let him through. There have been too many participants falling through the cracks, and the system’s image is its success rate. But this is a popular place for new couples to meet for the first time. It’s too busy. That’s the pressure point Peko is counting on. 

Fuyuhiko must be, too. “Hey,” she hears him bark, “you mind?”

It lifts the heads of some of the other participants. A few of them whisper; many of them stare. The guards hesitate— and then relent. The line breaks, and Fuyuhiko shoulders his way past.

He doesn't look back. The automatic doors slide shut behind him, and the relief that floods her chest is nearly dizzying. 

He’s done his part. She needs to do hers.

She gives him as much time as she can manage. She counts the seconds while she pretends to straighten the tie on the front of her dress; one, two, three, four, and then the guards in the dining room both stand up from their tables, one after the other.

She hopes he’s gained enough distance by now.

She starts down the aisle. The handful of participants still watching are all tense and alert; she can feel their eyes on her back as she passes, somehow louder than the actual noise from the rest of the dining room. There are quick footsteps on the carpet behind her, and the line blocking the entrance has been rebuilt. She can feel the snare closing fast around her ankle.

She breaks into a run.

The fragile attention of the dining room shatters; there is a ripple of gasps that starts at the tables along the main aisle. It evolves into shouts and screams when she throws the decorative host stand behind her, just in time to catch one of the guards behind her at the knee.

When she twists back around, one of the guards ahead of her has his taser aimed at a point below her waist.

There isn’t time to react. It’s an electric crackle in her ears, then a bite below her hip, and then every muscle in her left leg contracts at once.

She hits the ground hard. The uproar of the dining room evaporates, and leaves behind a swell of terrified silence. There’s room only for the custom instrumental string music piped in from the hidden speakers in the ceiling, delicate and romantic.

She’s being crowded on all sides. There are a pair of rough hands on her shoulders, dragging her up to her knees. Her arms are twisted behind her back. She can see the frosted glass of the doors ahead of her, and the hazy yellow-green of the community grounds beyond it. It’s just a few feet more. 

She owes it to him. 

More than that, she owes it to herself.

It’s a muscle memory she doesn’t recognize. She knows exactly where her points of leverage are, and where their points of vulnerability are. She presses her weight down through her knees, and throws her head back hard enough to crack the nose of the guard behind her. 

He lets go of her wrists to cover his own face. She makes it to one foot, and her elbow connects with the windpipe of the guard to her left. She makes it to both feet, and twists to dislodge the hand clamping around her forearm. She claws her way forward, taking purchase wherever she can find it. She kicks and scratches and fights, and an opening presents itself.

She makes a break for the doors.

They slide open to meet her. 

*

She runs.

The muscles in her legs scream with the effort; her left calf is still tingling, relearning pressure and sensation, and she almost turns her ankle clearing the barrier between the cart path and the grass.

She runs anyway. She sprints until her lungs are burning and her vision is swimming. When she reaches the thin stretch of woods just north of the wall, she crashes through brush and cobwebs and low-hanging branches. 

The odds of the two of them taking the same path to the wall are beyond slim. She hasn’t heard any guards behind her yet, but she also hasn’t looked, and they’ll only have so much time to find each other, a ladder, and get out. Through the haze of her own pain, exhaustion, and panic, she tries to plan through what few details she has.

She makes it through the woods with hanging moss in her hair and the hem of her left sleeve torn open. There is an embankment that slopes down to the road at the base of the wall, and she stops to catch her breath, to reorient herself to her surroundings, to plan her next step, and— 

He’s already there.

He’s lost both his jacket and his tie in the time since she last saw him. He’s smudged with dirt, and his shirttails are hanging from the waistband of his trousers, but he’s fine. He’s safe. He’s here, looking up at her, with his jaw hanging open.

She found him.

They stumble across the pavement toward each other. “Shit,” he manages between breaths. “ _Fuck._ Are you okay? Did they hurt you? I didn’t see what happened, but I heard— I could hear—” 

Nothing can be fixed in a moment. Escaping the system is only the first step of this process; there are hundreds of hurdles more for them to clear. But this moment is so much, too much, and when impulse grabs her, she embraces it. She reaches for him with both hands, frames his face between her palms, and kisses him like that: no hesitation, no fear. 

She feels his sharp intake of breath. He leans with her, into her; his grip turns sure against her waist, against her ribcage, against her back. It’s a rough, messy, breathless kiss, and her chest burns so bright she thinks it might crack open.

It doesn’t last long; they’re both too out of breath to keep from falling back apart from each other. He sways back on his heels, his hands fisted in her dress to keep himself steady.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I- I’m sorry. I realize we haven’t discussed each other’s boundaries yet, I just—”

“It’s fine,” he answers, his breath quick and warm against her cheek. He smiles, a small quirk of his mouth, and it almost makes her want to cry. “C’mon.” His hand curls around hers. “You first this time.”

He leads her to the nearest maintenance ladder, not twenty feet from where she came out onto the road. It’s tall, but somehow less so than she expected; she was already exhausted when she started the climb, but she feels almost energized by the time she reaches the top.

She hoists herself over the protective lip, and turns back to meet him. She reaches down to help him clear the final rung; it’s clumsy, perhaps unnecessary, but she still relishes the way he sways into her arms, and collapses there in a heap beside her.

There’s no one on the ladder beneath him. There’s no one, it seems, following them at all, or at least not successfully.

“Yeah!” he shouts over the edge, from his hands and knees. “Get _fucked!_ ”

It feels strange. It feels wrong. Even if the system relies entirely on the devices for location tracking, which she isn’t confident it does, there’s no reason they wouldn’t have been able to reasonably track Fuyuhiko’s from the section of his trip where it was still active. There’s no reason for them not to be followed. It doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t like it.

“Can I ask you something?” he says.

He tumbles down to sit beside her, leant back on his hands. He’s still breathing hard; his stamina is shorter than hers. It will be more precarious to climb down than it was to climb up. They could take the opportunity, improbable as it is, to rest. Just a moment, she tells herself, to let the spinning adrenaline in her blood fade. 

She nods.

“The day we met. Not— the dinner.” He grimaces at the distant dome of the hub behind them. “The _first_ time. In line, at that pairing day.”

The dinner hadn’t been the first thing she thought of. She’d thought of the persimmon, sweet and salty on her tongue. 

“I remember,” she answers.

“How did you feel?” he asks her. “What- What was that like, for you?”

She closes her eyes. She thinks. The details of the conversation are hazy, but the _feeling_ — she remembers that plainly. His laughter stealing into her chest, a warm, pleasant vibration; his eyes, not quite green and not quite hazel; wanting to find a reason to stay, even with her partner waiting for her on the other side of the celebration. He was a stranger. It didn’t make sense— but it did.

“I wished the table were longer,” she admits. She hears him snort, lightly, and almost opens her eyes so that she can see it, one more time, just in case. “I… wanted more time. I wanted to understand. It was strange, it almost felt like...”

The words aren’t there; the feeling is too big to describe. She flounders.

“Like it was too big,” he fills in. “Like we had a couple seconds for something that should’ve taken a couple hours. It made _sense,_ and that didn’t make any fucking sense. Right?”

She opens her eyes. He’s looking back at her, and his gaze is steady and intense on her face. “Yes,” she answers softly. It means something, and she has no idea what.

He must read her expression. “Fuck if I know either,” he says. “I just— needed to know if it was just me, I guess."

It wasn’t. It isn’t. 

In the end, though, she thinks maybe it doesn’t matter.

She loves him. That’s all. Beyond the system, beyond the algorithms, beyond right or wrong, deserving or not, feasible or not, there is only that aged, familiar feeling, and the name she’s been too afraid to give it again.

She lays her hand over his. “We should find a way down.”

They climb to their feet, but he doesn’t let go of her hand; they stand there together, shoulders close, braced against the relentless cut of wind over the top of the wall. Wilderness spills out in all directions, tall pines clumped together in messy rows. It meets the line of the sky somewhere too far out for her to see; at some point, the dark outlines of trees just become darkness.

“I can’t see shit,” he mutters by her ear. “It’s so fuckin’ _dark._ Where are the stars?” 

“We’ll find it together,” she answers. He looks at her, his hair rumpled by the wind, his hand still curled around hers, and he smiles.

There’s so much still to say. There are discussions to have, admissions to make, apologies to give. The moment isn’t now, but that’s alright. 

They have time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

END

 

TRIAL #: 500  
Simulation completed without errors.

USAMI ID: 0779566513PP  


Calculating results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  


Days in simulation: 959  
Successful rebellion: Y  
Expected partner ID: 0791359148CT  
Chosen partner ID: 0778320149KF

Status: FAIL  
Message: Mismatch between predicted partner and final partner. WARNING: Revisit algorithm if overall success rate is below 70% threshold.  
Participant average success rate: 0.2%

Printing participant history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

**TrialId** | **DaysToTrialEnd** | **IsAttemptedRebellion** | **IsSuccessfulRebellion** | **ExpectedPartnerID** | **ActualPartnerID** | **FinalStatus**  
---|---|---|---|---|---|---  
0451 | 734 | 1 | 1 | 0784732834OS | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0023 | 22 | 1 | 0 | 0774857403TG | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0005 | 985 | 0 | NULL | 0783827584IM | NULL | FAIL  
0376 | 200 | 1 | 0 | 0786453281AA | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0154 | 2421 | 1 | 1 | 0794827492MK | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0167 | 1432 | 1 | 0 | 0793485692AK | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0362 | 3243 | 1 | 0 | RSV9573853HH | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0002 | 4214 | 1 | 1 | 0779675843KM | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0423 | 632 | 0 | NULL | RSV8437564KN | NULL | FAIL  
0273 | 94 | 1 | 1 | 0791359148CT | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0489 | 856 | 1 | 0 | 0783827584IM | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0078 | 5452 | 1 | 0 | 0775843954OA | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0214 | 777 | 1 | 1 | RSV9573853HH | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0163 | 1232 | 0 | NULL | 0784732834OS | NULL | FAIL  
0088 | 47 | 1 | 1 | 0783217458KK | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0195 | 4314 | 1 | 1 | 0783523864OM | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0019 | 132 | 0 | NULL | 0795647492GG | NULL | FAIL  
0321 | 778 | 1 | 0 | 0794827492MK | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0211 | 5372 | 1 | 0 | 0784736583FC | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0478 | 365 | 1 | 1 | 0784721943MS | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0021 | 8471 | 1 | 0 | 0774783917NS | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0101 | 414 | 1 | 1 | 0794731847SS | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0282 | 324 | 0 | NULL | 0791738417AR | NULL | FAIL  
0421 | 3241 | 1 | 1 | 0774838104NN | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0016 | 543 | 1 | 0 | 0774857403TG | 0778320149KF | FAIL  
0065 | 563 | 1 | 1 | 0778320149KF | 0778320149KF | PASS  
  
_WARNING: Data has been truncated_

 

 

 

 

PRAC_86B_HA_FINAL  
TRIAL #: 501  
Loading environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  
Setting parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  
Running algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

USAMI ID: 0779566513PP  
Expected partner ID: 0794839672HM

BEGIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't noticed my sneaky change in the chapter number yet, we're actually not quite finished -- there's a short epilogue coming to wrap up some loose ends and answer some of the lingering questions you might have. That said, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's stuck with this story and its (a bit) rocky update schedule, and to everyone who's enjoyed the ride! I appreciate all your kudos and comments so much. Thanks for reading!


	15. Epilogue

“Is there room for us to sit with you, Kuzuryuu-kun?”

He’s got the three seats closest to the aisle in the back row of the auditorium. Natsumi was supposed to help him keep them, but Natsumi gave up holding the fort to crawl down to Koizumi’s spot near the front, and he hasn’t seen Nanami or Hinata in— years now, probably.

“Go ahead,” he tells them. “If my sister’s got a problem with it, she can complain about it later.”

“Thanks,” Nanami says.

“As long as you’re the one telling her that,” Hinata says.

“Just shut up and sit.” They clasp forearms briefly when Hinata slides past. “Good to see you, man.”

“Yeah,” Hinata answers, his smile crooked. “You too.”

Nanami waddles in behind him. When he only goes two seats down from Fuyuhiko’s chair, she pokes him between the shoulderblades. “One more, Hajime.”

“What? What for?”

“Because.” She smiles back at Fuyuhiko. All this time later, and she still smiles at him the same way, like she _knows._ It’s the closest to smug Nanami ever gets. “I don’t want to take Pekoyama-san’s seat before she gets here.”

“Pekoyama’s not here yet?”

She’s not. She’s been texting him status updates all morning: her flight in from Fukuoka landed on time, and the driver picked her up when he was supposed to, but nothing else after that. She’d insisted on fitting the Ueda meeting into her morning schedule so that they could have an open afternoon, but that should’ve been finished an hour ago.

“She’s busy,” he says. Hinata’s eyebrows arch. “What, you thought we came into town just for you? We got business.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“That’s alright.” Nanami’s still smiling. “I’m glad you could both still make it, Kuzuryuu-kun. I know you didn’t really want to.”

“If everyone is seated,” one of the judges says pointedly into her microphone. Down the aisle, Koizumi has to tug Natsumi down into the seat beside her, “we’d like to begin day two of practical examinations for the 86th class, beginning with—” She glances down at the page in front of her. “Hashimoto Aika, the Ultimate Data Scientist.” 

People clap. The kid flounces onto the stage. The whole thing isn’t that much different from when they were in school, except for how much more elaborate the audio visual setup is; a spotlight tracks Hashimoto up the steps, and there’s a massive flatscreen above and behind her. She has her own microphone on a _headset,_ for fuck’s sake.

She doesn’t exactly look the part of a data scientist, but people in this school hardly ever do; she’s got dramatic makeup with bleached-pink hair, and she ditched her uniform for a layered dress with a heart pattern. Most students treat their exams as evaluations from the school; before she even opens her mouth, he knows Hashimoto is the type to try and get one from the cameras.

“Good morning, everyone!” She’s gushing already. The fake enthusiasm grates on his nerves. “Before we get started, you should know that we have some very special guests here in the auditorium with us. I want to extend a big thank you to the 77th, 78th, and 79th classes, who’ve helped make this presentation possible.” She swings her arm out towards their section, and the spotlights glare over them. “Aren’t our alumni great?!”

There’s polite applause. People in the public seating crane their necks to gawk at them. The seat between him and Nanami is still empty.

It’s gonna be a long fucking morning.

*

She’s late. The presentation has already begun by the time she makes it past the visitor’s office; the doors to the auditorium are shut, and she can hear the muffled voice of the presenter through them, already in full swing. 

She’ll need to apologize to Nanami, when she has the chance.

It’s an aging set of heavy, wooden double doors. That doesn’t make the task impossible, just one requiring more care; she’s done this before, if not recently. It’s muscle memory to slowly turn the mechanism, lift the door a fraction of an inch above the threshold, and slide it back without creaking the hinges. 

No heads turn when she slips into the room, not even the presenter’s. She’s pacing the length of the stage in long, exaggerated strides, and there is a pixelated heart in fluorescent pink on the display behind her. “So!” she says, with a flourish. “Let’s talk about _love._ ”

Her name is Hashimoto; a data scientist, if Peko remembers Nanami’s email correctly. She eases the doors shut behind her and lingers at the back of the room, her shoulders to the wall.

Hashimoto cups one hand theatrically around her ear. “I can hear you now: ‘Aika-chan! We thought this was a data presentation! You can’t quantify _love!_ ’ But I’m here to tell you: that attitude is just silly.” She presses a button on a hidden remote in her palm, and the boxy edges of the heart on the screen smooth to rounded curves. “Enough points on a line, and you get a curve. Enough data from enough variables—” Again, and the heart disintegrates into pages and pages of scrolling data. “And you can model _anything._ ”

She’s more of a performer than a scientist, Peko decides. It isn’t quite the presentation she had been expecting. 

“And _that_ is what you’re here to see today,” Hashimoto goes on. “I’ve spent all year developing, expanding, and honing my own fully automated matchmaking algorithm, codename: USAMI.”

The data on the screen behind her coalesces into an acronym: Ultimate Scalable Automated Matching Interface. Stamped in the corner is the same logo as the phone application they’d been asked to download at the beginning of the project: the round face of a rabbit, in a pink and white color palette.

(She doesn’t have many applications on her phone. She’d enjoyed seeing that one on her home screen; it will be a shame to remove it.)

Hashimoto keeps talking. Peko scans the seats of the alumni section for the backs of familiar heads.

“Now, what you’re about to witness is USAMI’s very first full-scale, _live_ test run. Right now, we’re running simulations through a rigorous, controlled virtual environment, using data generously provided by our very own Hope’s Peak alumni. Not just dozens, not just hundreds, but a _thousand_ fully-realized simulations, challenging my algorithm as we speak.” 

She finds the two she’s looking for. Both Natsumi and Fuyuhiko are seated in the third section, at the other side of the room: Natsumi closer to the stage with Koizumi, and Fuyuhiko at the back with Nanami and Hinata.

“Each simulation uses a different combination of three hundred crucial matchmaking variables, and plays out just a _liiiiitle_ bit differently than the others. USAMI’s job is to look at the data, and calculate a true love match for every participant in every trial.”

Peko has a top-down view into the audience; she can see how unsure couples start to glance at one another. Hashimoto must be able to sense the tension, because she looks straight into the alumni section, her arms outstretched.

“Before everyone in our VIP section starts to get nervous: we don’t load true-to-life simulations of individuals into this environment. We only needed realistic personality profiles to test the algorithm. All biographical data was stripped or de-identified, and all provided data will be fully deleted at the end of the test. So no need to worry your boyfriend or girlfriend: they’re still the one for you!” She winks. “Probably!”

It gets a reaction from the crowd, a ripple of murmurs that mingle and overlap until they’re a dull roar. Hashimoto encourages it with a burst of overenthusiastic laughter, and Peko takes the opportunity to slink down the back aisle to the third alumni section.

Nanami sees her first. She sits forward in her seat, and it’s enough to get the other two to turn their heads. 

“Pekoyama-san,” she greets in a whisper. 

Hinata lifts one hand in a half-wave. “Glad you could make it.”

Fuyuhiko seems startled, and she can’t blame him; they’d agreed to meet at the school gates, before she was delayed with Ueda. He slides down to offer her the seat at the end of the row, and then he smiles at her. It’s easy, like a reflex. It’s hardly any different than any other time he’s looked at her like that, but it strikes her anyway, unselfconscious in a way he never would have been when it was them sitting exams in this auditorium, years ago. 

“Hi,” he says softly.

She’s missed him. It’s so good to see him again. The weight of her week in Fukuoka never felt so heavy as it does right now, in the moment it lifts off her shoulders.

She murmurs back, “Hello.”

*

Peko slips into the chair beside him, seamless and silent, like she’d been there all along. She looks good— harried, maybe, but satisfied and confident too, in a way that almost looks out of place against the backdrop of Hope’s Peak. She sits tall, shoulders relaxed and eyes forward.

“I _know_ what you’re thinking,” Hashimoto is saying, loudly enough to drown out and settle the crowd. “‘Aika-chan, how does anybody measure true love? That’s ridiculous! Love is a feeling, isn’t it?’”

Her whole spiel is a crock of shit. He can’t believe _this_ is what Nanami signed them up for: some spotlight-hungry teenager trying to score a TV deal by reducing love to ones and zeroes. It’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. Anyone who thinks it is has never been in the mess of it.

Hashimoto walks the edge of the stage, one foot after the other, heel to toe. She’s quiet for several seconds, longer than she’s been the entire presentation so far, and when she lifts her head, her expression is serious and subdued. 

“Love is a choice,” she says, and waits long moments for it to sink into the silence. “It’s not just feeling something, it’s committing to it. It’s facing down the unknown with another person, no matter how vast or scary it is. It’s determination. It’s bravery. _That’s_ the kind of love my algorithm measures.”

It’s intense. It’s weird. It almost feels out of place in the rest of her presentation, just by virtue of the fact that it’s the first thing that’s actually sounded— _genuine._

To his left, Hinata lays his hand over Nanami’s. It’s not some showy or ostentatious PDA, just a quiet, gentle acknowledgement.

Fuyuhiko’s chest feels too small. He’s not brave enough to look to his right.

“Our simulation offers participants a choice. Option A, they can commit to a person the system chooses for them. A comfortable, guaranteed solution. A so-called ‘Ultimate Match.’” Hashimoto winks at the crowd again. “We had fun with the terminology, I think it makes the whole thing feel a little more _alive,_ you know?” There’s scattered applause, and she barrels on with a raised palm. “ _Or_ — they can rebel against the system itself, and risk everything to be with the person _they_ choose. What’s more romantic than a good rebellion story, am I right?”

She’s getting back into character, now. Whatever the moment was, it’s gone. A few rows down, Mioda whistles.

“USAMI’s job was to guess the person each participant would eventually rebel with, if they rebelled at all, before each simulation. Our success threshold was that she would get it right 70 percent of the time.” The screen behind her splits into two columns: a green _70%_ in tall characters on one side, and a large question mark in red on the other. “That’s how we would know if my matching algorithm was performing better than average. But who wants a 70 percent success rate when they’re getting matched with the love of their life? Right? Am I right?” 

She doesn’t wait for anyone to respond. She clicks her remote, and the numbers in green begin to scramble.

“So what if I told you that I’m confident my algorithm doesn’t just have a 70 percent success rate, or an 80 percent success rate… But 99.8?”

The remote clicks again, and the numbers slide into place like icons on a slot machine: _99.8%_

“We just wrapped up the final simulation,” she pretends to check a watch she doesn’t have, “a few seconds ago, so even I don’t know what the final percentage is. We’re gonna find that out together. Remember: if USAMI correctly guesses who the participant chooses to rebel with, it’s a success! Any other outcome, it fails.” She points her remote at the crowd. “Are you ready?” 

They whoop back at her; it’s taken less than ten minutes for all of them to completely buy what she’s selling. Another click on the remote, and this time the red numbers start to scramble. 

“Three!” Hashimoto shouts. “Two! One!”

The numbers slide into place:

10.4%

Nanami says, “Oh.” Hinata sounds like he’s swallowing his laughter and doing a bad job of it. Fuyuhiko feels his own jaw drop; he expected it to be bad, with all the bullshit she was feeding them, but not _that_ fucking bad.

The rest of the room is dead silent. 

When she doesn’t get the reaction she expects, Hashimoto turns on her heel. They can only see the back of her head when she stares up at the screen.

“That’s not right,” she says, and for the first time her persona starts to show cracks. “That can’t be right.”

His phone buzzes against his thigh.

He doesn’t need to be expecting calls to get them, but it’s still abrupt enough that it almost startles him straight out of his chair. When he manages to dig it out of his pocket, he doesn’t recognize the number— and for once he’s absolutely fucking _thrilled_ to answer.

Peko is already looking at him. He turns the screen up to show her. “I don’t have to take this,” he tells her, “but I’m gonna anyway.”

She smiles, enough to just barely touch the corners of her lips, and it flips something over in his stomach. “I understand,” she says, sliding back to give him room to pass. “Good luck.”

“Why him?” Hinata complains under his breath. “We’re going to need more of it.”

“Wait!” Hashimoto is saying, her panicked breathing too close to the microphone. Nobody’s had the common fucking sense yet to cut her audio. “Wait, wait, I’m sure there’s some kind of glitch here— If- If you can just get Fujisaki-sensei, I’m sure—”

He pulls the auditorium doors shut behind him.

*

The presentation only devolves from there. Hashimoto gets into an argument with the entire panel of judges before her headset is finally disconnected from the global audio. More staff is called to the stage. Tabloid journalists leap on the opportunity for an unflattering story.

Hinata and Nanami seem content to wait out the confusion. When other audience members start to abandon their seats, Peko slips out of the auditorium with them.

He hasn’t gone far, only far enough to avoid the growing crowd. She finds him perched on the short wall between the breezeway and a courtyard to the west of the auditorium, where it’s empty and quiet. He’s still on the phone, but he sees her when she turns the corner, and he smiles at her, again, as plainly and simply as before.

“Yeah, well, I’ve got my afternoon booked up already,” he’s saying as he waves her over. “So you better come up with something to talk about fast.”

She joins him on the edge of the wall. As the conversation goes on, it seems whoever it is really doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say; she can hear Fuyuhiko’s unravelling patience in between each bitten-off word. He’s gotten better at this, too— but some things can always use improvement.

“Tell you what,” he says abruptly, and that’s when she knows the conversation is finished, “next time I’m in town, let’s see if I remember to call you.”

He hangs up. “Not helpful?” she asks.

“Big waste of fuckin’ time,” he confirms. “Sorry you had to sit through it.”

“You waited for me when my meeting with Ueda ran long,” she says. “It’s alright.”

“You say that like you weren’t the one doing me a huge fuckin’ favor just by showing up, late or not.” He maneuvers himself around so that he isn’t sitting cross-legged on the wall anymore. It gives them room to better sit together, and briefly brushes his shoulder with hers. “What’s the damage in there, anyway?”

She considers. There isn’t exactly a polite way to describe the final state of Hashimoto’s exam. “I believe we have some time before the next presentation begins,” she says delicately, and it makes him laugh, a soft snicker that steals into the center of her chest.

“That bad, huh?” He turns his phone up in his palm, and swipes through to find the rabbit logo of Hashimoto’s test application. He has more of them that she does. “At least I can finally delete this fucking app.”

It’s time. She follows the same steps on her own phone, and confirms the deletion when it asks. As much as she likes the style of the logo, the application itself only existed to support Hashimoto’s project, mining data to build the personality profiles that would eventually be loaded into her program. Fuyuhiko had agreed to participate only on the condition that Fujisaki be the one to handle encryption within the application, and that it wouldn’t be installed on any business devices.

It’s a large application. A progress bar appears to track the packets of data as they’re deleted, and it fills slowly.

“Is it really that much of a security concern?” she asks.

“Nah. Fujisaki knows his shit. It’s just— creepy. And I’m paranoid, y’know?”

“You’re careful,” she corrects. “And thoughtful to consequences.”

He snorts. “Try telling anybody here that and see what they say.”

“They haven’t seen you like I have,” she answers without thinking.

Even if it’s true, it’s still a misstep. He lifts his eyes to look at her, and the air between them changes, charges, like a brewing electrical storm just in the breath of distance between their shoulders. He looks briefly at her mouth. She can feel warmth spreading from her neck to her face.

The shift itself isn’t unfamiliar. They’ve been here before. It’s a door they’ve both been careful not to open, in the time since their graduation; as the years have gone by, she’s felt less and less prepared for the reality of what might be beyond it. That hasn’t stopped one or both of them from stepping to the threshold on occasion, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. 

What’s unsettling is that she isn’t sure which it is, this time. 

She breaks the eye contact first. She focuses on her phone, and watches the progress bar fill.

“So how was, uh.” He clears his throat. “How was the rest of your trip?”

She had been to Fukuoka before this trip, but never alone, and never in a business capacity. It’s a new market that Fuyuhiko has been nurturing for some time, work that’s beginning to show results, bit by bit. She had asked to be put on the project. She wants to see it succeed as much as he does.

“Strange,” she decides. “But good, I think.”

His smile is back, a small quirk at the edge of his mouth. “Yeah?”

“Yes. Chinen’s enterprise is doing well. I enjoyed exploring investment options with her.” 

“Good. That’s— great.” He nods, perhaps too much. It’s clumsy, a bit, but well-meaning. “You can always do stuff like that more often. I mean, if you want.”

She can feel herself smiling, too. “I know.”

Some of the tension between them has eased. It always dissipates eventually, sometimes more quickly than others. He sways slightly in his spot, enough that it pulls his shoulder away from hers, enough that cooler air rushes in to fill the space, and she finds herself wishing it had been just a bit slower, this time.

“I gotta say, though, it— it’s good to have you back.” His jaw works. He isn’t quite looking at her when he says, “I missed you, y’know?” 

Her skin prickles, goosebumps rising on her forearms. It all rushes back in, the tension and electricity and intangible heat, and— it must have been intentional, mustn't it? He must have known. He must have felt it fading, the same way she had.

(Had he missed it, like she had?)

It takes her a moment to realize her heart is pounding.

“Yes,” she answers softly, and his eyes lift to hers. “I missed you, too.”

Hashimoto’s experiment was a failure. Whatever data her application was able to mine on Peko’s personality, there’s no way to know how complete the picture it painted was. It’s too late to wonder how a patchwork simulation of herself may have approached the question of true love, perhaps. But there is a question, here, now— one that she’s spent years ignoring and avoiding.

He’s come so far. So has she. She has left the door between them shut, because of their history, or their growth, or their fear. They were all good reasons, once. She doesn’t regret the choice she made.

Their history can never be erased, but their growth has taken them above and beyond it. It’s taken them here, to a place she could have never fathomed when she was still a student at this academy: stronger and happier and more full than she’s ever been, with him sitting beside her. All that’s left is the fear. All that’s left is the choice.

What does she want?

The progress bar fills to the end. Her phone buzzes with brief haptic feedback: application deleted.

“We have the afternoon,” she says. “I’d like to stop by Nanami’s reunion party for a few minutes, but… after…” She thinks she should be nervous. Instead her chest is burning so bright she thinks it might crack open. “Maybe we could go somewhere. Together.”

She doesn’t need to explain. The understanding is there, plain between the shock and apprehension on his face. 

The first thing he asks is: “... are you sure?”

“No,” she admits. “I’m… afraid, if I’m honest.” 

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Yeah, me, too.”

He sits up. He lays his hand over hers, gently, hesitantly, and when she doesn’t pull away, looks up into her face.

“How about dinner?” he asks. “Down by the river?”

It sounds like a lovely place to start.


End file.
